In my post “Things To Overestimate When Planning A Project” I mentioned that I would show you how overestimating those three aspects came in to play with my current project. The results of my estimates for these three aspects have been quite varied so far.

To follow the same order as the above mentioned post, I will start with the cost. Once I figured out which radios I wanted to have in my Blazer I was easily able to find out how much they would cost as well as the price of the antennas. However, I did not know exactly how much it would cost for the rest of the materials (wire to get power to the radio, supplies for my custom mounting solution for the radios, etc) and just had to guesstimate how much those items would total. In this case I was fairly close but my estimation was a bit lower than the actual cost. Luckily, it wasn’t a major issue because I rounded up on some of the costs I did know to make the math easier and it all came out about the same.

Moving to the time required to complete the project, even with quite a bit of planning and organizing, this project is taking quite a bit longer than I expected. Of course, the first hold up was waiting for the radio to arrive, but beyond that, the installation itself has been more time consuming than I planned for. If the project is similar to others that you have done in the past, it may not take as long and you may also be able to more accurately estimate the amount of time it will take, but from my current experience I would advise to greatly overestimate the time required. I would be much happier if I had overestimated the amount of time required and had extra time the day I was working on it than I am in my current situation where I have the project partially done and am waiting for an opportunity and some available time to complete the project.

Finally, the one thing I did quite well on with this project. While the project is not complete yet, so far it looks like I will not have any need to stop in the middle of the project to go and get something that I need. For the materials I have used so far, I had significantly more than I needed and had plenty of room for error (with enough material to be able to redo any mistakes) with plenty of materials left over which can now be used for another (as of yet unknown) project in the future.

As you can see, it would likely be beneficial in most situations to overestimate on all three of these areas when you are planning your next project. Hopefully I can finish this project soon and then I will get some more information posted about it.