The Law families first project was a 115m2 1940s home near the beach on a 450m2 section. We purchased for ourselves and then quickly realised we wanted to live further north!
The previous owners had this property on the rental market and so as you could imagine… there was holes throughout and the design was set up for bedrooms not living.
Our thought process was to figure out who our customer was going to be?
For a beach bach or a small family, having a 4 bedroom – 115m2 home seemed unrealistic for the proposed customer.
*not actual
Project plan was created loosely to encompass the needs for 2/3 people with a relaxed outside relaxation lifestyle. The value surely was in living space and enjoying the kapiti sun.
With Agile renovation, the requirements are loose, this allows changes to be made right up until the last minute (much like going from going from a 4 bed to a 3rd in the space of a week). Me and my wife spent a day or two producing our first attempt at a renovation story map which ended up with our Activities for these projects were the following:
As a home owner I must have the ability to hold a dining party outside for at least 6 people while maintaining a low maintenance area so that I can enjoy the outside living
As a home owner I must have modern decor so that I do not need to renovate upon purchase
As a home owner I maintain a sense of space for my family so that I can feel comfortable in my home
These activities really did push for a light, clutter free environment, however, left enough room to customize the solution based upon the potential customers need or budget.
As we did not have a customer to work with us through the renovation; my wife was the Product Owner and had to assume the customers needs and desires.
The next step was to create the user stories. There was LOTS! Too many to place into this one blog post but we had so many scenarios and ideas to do to this property it was exciting and scary at the same time, since we had decided on using user stories we had to prioritize based on assumed highest ROI.
I.E this will roughly cost 1k and will bring an additional 3k to the end price.
The Minimal Viable Product (MVP) ended up with less then 20 user tasks and around a hundred user stories. We were set, we would complete the MVP and then get a valuation, if we were happy… we would sell.
The great thing about this form of planning is that we can re plan and re adjust whenever we feel we need to. It allows complete Traceability and Transparency for us and anyone else involved in our project. Over the next 9 months we would get quotes just in time and find ourselves re arranging stories on our backlog (just ended up being a wall in the house, then a door and then finally a piece of a5 paper), removing stories and splitting them to get the MVP done for the lowest price. Most user stories were based around either specific rooms or general items like HEATING!
As a Home Owner I want to have control over my temperature from a central location so that I do not need multiple heating and/or cooling devices.
Once Tasks were confirmed i.e a decision on the solution was made, the user story is removed from the backlog and the day to day tasks replace it. This allows things like
- Buy Heater
- Choose Where heater goes
- Install Heater
This was always done just in time to allow any other stories to influence or constrain the solution. these tasks were also prioritized and voila! Each week our team (me and my wife) stood in front of our board and chose tasks we knew we could complete by the end of the week, we assigned them to ourselves and completed them; documenting any new discoveries along the way.
If these tasks ended up creating new tasks then we added them on the board. It becomes a straight forward goal based “Meeting”
So now we have briefly gone over the process, lets get into the renovation 🙂
Our solution was to ensure when you walked into a room you had a sense of space, the only way to achieve this in a small home was to remove a bedroom to allow a functional dining or second living area away from the front door.
Instead of going all the way across and causing structural issues and approval, we just opened up the doorway (this also allows the next owner to revert if they need. )
The heating source was found installed by GAS and a giant 8KWH school heater 🙂
Of course, we needed to build a large deck and completely transform the front garden to allow low maintenance for the potential owner.
We created a nice back garden, a low maintenance front garden and a 44m2 deck with a small BBQ Patio, fixed the fence, painted the house and added a gate! Perfect for the beach
