When plans get blown out of the sky spectacularly.
As a planner for most of my career I have found the art of adding contingency something of a second nature approach to all plans which I build.
So going into the next project this was no exception, I drafted a rough project plan for our ground up, back to brick HMO refurbishment from a 7 bedsit with shared bathroom property to a 8 bedroom all ensuite with shared kitchen and living space. The design was high spec and the project was a big one tanking the basement, new connections for utilities, new layout and 8 bathrooms to find spaces and pipe work voids for. Showed the plan to a few local builders and priced the job up, gave the timings a tweak based on the information the builders had provided and settled on a plan to do this refurb which would take about 8-10 months (builders quoted 6). All good, let's do this.
So the project started and all was going well, we ran into the usual issues and found ways around them, something you are not told in property development before you start is the strangest of issues will crop up, most of which have never happened before and unlikely to ever happen again. The strangest for this project was we had a water mains pipe coming into our basement which had connections to both the neighbouring property, so when we cut the water supply, so were there water supplies cut, who ever thought this was a good idea when this was originally done was smoking something special.
We were mostly at the point of back to brick when we hit our newest issue which was not for-seen. COVID-19. Yeah Coronavirus this thing that started off as a problem half way around the world suddenly stopped us in our tracks. We were in lockdown and despite everyone feeling OK for the most part and some people happy to carry on working the biggest hurdle we faced was supplies, If someone had told me at one point in 2020 I would be bartering on bags of plaster like it was water in the middle of the desert I would have laughed in there face, but I was, I needed 30 bags of the stuff just to keep the project moving and it was sold out across the country for WEEKS. You can't plan for everything.
We finally managed to aquire bags of plaster in dribs and drabs to keep things moving along slowly but in the middle of it all we had an issue with the builder and then found ourselves mid lockdown with no ability to move anything forward. We were already running into our contingency but at this point we were looking at months and months of delays beyond our worst case scenario.
We pushed ahead leaning on contacts and people we knew locally, This project is 300 miles from my house, so not one I can pop to every now and again but when the times are tough you have to do what's needed, so as soon as things were looking better Covid wise we had deployed a new team onto this.
As with everything, new team means new issues, mostly as they all want to tell me how the last person didn't do things the way they should (meaning the same way they did) and everyone wants to start from scratch and rip out what's been done so far. Trade after trade, all the same.
We carry on, finding people and materials where we can despite people being massively busy now and supplies limited, but what are our options? Stop, Never, we are more resilient than that.
Anyway Long story short, a year and 9 months after purchase we have a completed HMO, it looks AMAZING!
Blood, sweat, tears, covid but it has all been worth it in the end.
How do I know?
We have 6 happy tenants already and viewings daily
We have refinanced the property to pull out as much as we can
We have moved onto our next project.
What was the net impact?
1 Year longer than expected
and 50% over budget...
We learn from our lessons, they make us stronger, more informed next time, never give up...
Good luck for you and your projects. Fingers crossed for no more nation wide lockdowns impacting our projects...
