The Adored Abode

We’ve been doing DIY and renovation projects together for a long time now (coming up on 9 years?! where has time gone?). We are by no means professionals, but we have learned a few things along the way that have helped us make the process of DIY and renovation projects not just survival, but actually enjoyable.

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Here are 5 tips to think about when working on a DIY or renovation project with your significant other.

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Start small

Much like you wouldn’t run a marathon without training, its not wise to attempt a major renovation project with your significant other right off the bat without training – maybe start with something more approachable, such as Ikea furniture assembly or painting a room together. Practice makes progress and improvement.

Tip: Practice working with your significant other on a small project before jumping into a big project together.

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Know yourself and your partner’s working style

This was a little bit of a struggle for us, but once we got it figured out we became a really good team. Nathan is a little more methodical where as I am much more impulsive. One thing we did that was useful for helping us understand each other better was free Enneagram testing (Nathan is a 5 and I’m a 1, if you are interested). Now we talk about Enneagram types frequently and joke about the differences between our types. Knowing our enneagram personality subtypes has helped us not only with renovations, but in our day to day life. Some enneagram resources even offer detailed relationship combinations – we have read through these together and discussed our interpretations and what we agree with and disagree with. We can’t recommend learning about your personality types enough.

Tip: Use enneagram resources to learn about your personality types.

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Approach projects in manageable chunks

Breaking projects up has historically been a major challenge for us. When we first started with renovation projects we would plan out a whole project, step by step and plan for completion in a day. Inevitably we would get started and when things didn’t go according to plan (see #5 below) we would have to go back and entirely replan which led to serious frustrations. We have started intentionally under scheduling our time because things almost always take longer than we expect. if we have a whole Saturday for a project we only schedule what we think would take half a day. This works well for us and helps us not feel as discouraged for not achieving our aggressive plans. The side benefit is that only scheduling a partial day affords us some time to relax, recharge and work on other activities and hobbies.

Tip: Create a task list and break your project into chunks. Intentionally under schedule to allow some margin.

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Define ‘success’ before you start

Plan your project with the end goal in mind – I think this goes without saying and is a fairly intuitive concept. However, we are guilty of starting more than one project without clearly discussing what a successful outcome looks like which caused some tension between us. Now when we start a project we always discuss what our design goal is.

Tip: Agree on a mood board or inspiration image before you start your project.

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Things will not go perfectly – don’t expect them to

We don’t have any tips to address this, nothing goes perfectly according to plan, but problem solving on the fly is most of the fun of DIY projects.

Tip: Be prepared to problem solve along the way (and extra trips to the hardware store!).

We hope these tips are useful to you and help you as you embark on a project with your significant other. Please share any other tips for working on DIY or Renovation projects with your significant other in the comments!