When you decide to embark on another round of home improvement, you likely envision a simple job with excellent results. You’ll decide what you want to do, buy the right equipment, maybe set aside a day or two to complete the work, and voila: a new and improved area of your is complete.

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However, if you have ever engaged with DIY home improvements before, you’ll likely be well aware of the fact that things never quite work out like that. Some DIY tasks may seem simple, but actually take a huge amount of time and effort to get right. So when you plan your next project, it’s important you keep in mind the potential enhanced timescale if you’re doing any of the following…

3 Home Improvement Tasks That Take Longer Than You Think

Painting

This applies to both internal and external painting, and both suffer from the same issue: preparation. The length of time it takes to actually paint a wall is relatively short, but all the work around it — the preparation, cleaning up, waiting for coats to dry — can be extremely time-consuming. If you’re looking for a quick finish, it’s best to outsource to a professional ; their experience will mean that they can zip through the prep work and thus finish the entire job in a record time.

Laying laminate flooring

Laminate flooring has been specifically designed to be easy to lay and, to an extent, it is. The boards do click together well, and actually arranging the planks in place is a very quick process. However, the time-consuming part of laying laminate flooring is actually cutting the planks to size; this can easily quadruple the time it takes you to lay the floor. When the planks are cut it’s a pretty easy process, but measuring, cutting, and checking plank length can turn a half-hour job until a couple of days worth of work.

Building a deck

The problems you’ll experience building a deck are, in some ways, similar to the ones you will experience when laying laminate flooring. Elements of the process are quick and simple, but all the related tasks can really drag it down. If someone were to hand you pieces of decking one at a time, cut to the right length, with the correct screws, then you could probably build a deck incredibly quickly. However, that’s not the case, so you’ll lose a huge amount of time to , preparing, leveling, and all the other tasks you need to actually assemble the deck for yourself.

How to cope

The easiest way to cope with the three tasks above is to outsource to a professional, who will be able to finish the process in good time thanks to years of experience. If outsourcing isn’t an option, then all you can do is practice good time management during the project, and set aside longer to complete the work than you think it will take. So if you think the job will take a day, set aside two and if you finish sooner, see it as a bonus.

This is a contributed post.

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