Curb appeal landscaping project – Part 2 – Planning

A step by step plan for our curb appeal landscaping project

We’ve been working on our curb appeal landscaping project for a couple of weeks now and we’re ready for the next step – planning. We got through our general idea and estimating parts with only some minor brain and eye strain, and as our next step we need to plan out all  the steps so we can make sure everything gets done in time. We also need to make sure we don’t conflict with any of our other projects. Planning any project can be a little bit of a bummer because you don’t get to DO any of the steps, just think about them and write them down. Especially when you’re talking about planning a gardening project. It’s still too cold to do much outside, so we’re focusing on our regular indoor houseplant routine and starting our outdoor plants for spring

Get your self setup for planning

You can do a project plan with your choice of tools. Anything from paper and pencil all the way to a robust tracking tool.  To map out our curb appeal landscaping project plan, we used Microsoft Project because contrary to popular opinion, it’s a good tool and a personal favorite.  Any way you prefer of making a list with dates and showing what has to happen in which order is ideal.

Don’t forget to take life into account

As noted in our garden expansion project planning step, you need  to take holidays or other non-working time into account. You’ll want to prevent the of drama in having to move tasks or try to be creative to pick up any slack. The best thing to do, before writing any of your tasks down is to grab a calendar and look at what times and days will be available for working on your project and blocking out anything where you might have a conflict. Don’t forget to include family time for birthdays and special events, and any extra days you might have to spend on your leaf babies.

Make your plan

Now that we have the structure and critical dates out of the way we can open this bag of snakes and lay them out straight. Similar to our estimate we laid out our tasks for the curb appeal project in buy, build, plant order. we made top level categories called buy, build and plant, figuring we have to buy stuff before we can build with it, and build stuff before we can plant anything. Since we have some competition for our time, in taking care of the vegetable garden we included those tasks in our plan to make sure there was n

Task list

After you get your headings sorted so you can make sense of what all you’re going to be working on, come up with anything that you’ll need to do in that category.  As general rules of thumb a task should be a complete thing to itself, so it can’t be listed in multiple categories unless its something you’re going to do more than once. As an example, you might think mulch might go under both the buy and build area since its both something we have to buy and something we have to install.  The way we accounted for that in our plan is that under Buy, we listed all the items to purchase, and then under build we listed the activity that we’ll do with it.

Here’s our general task list:

Task Name

Curb Appeal Landscaping Project

Plan Considerations

Decide key dates

Research material shipping times

Check availability for conflicts

Indoor planting dates

Thaw date

Last frost date

Estimation

Decide overall project approach

Make materials list

Check in house inventory

Research materials cost

Blog post / Journal

Buy

Mulch

Plants

Ground contact lumber

Lights

Build

Level garden area

Install Mulch

Install Walkways

Install Plants

Install lights

Plant

Harden starts outside

Transplant seedlings

Direct Sow

Vegetable Garden Update

Buy

Planting medium

Seeds

Plant stakes

Build

Level garden area

Plant indoors

Harden indoor plants

Transplant indoor plants

Direct Sow outdoor plants

Timing

The order of the list does not drive order of activities strictly but it just gives us the opportunity to write down whatever comes to mind from a task perspective.  We could get down to even higher levels of detail here, as an example, installing the walkway could be broken down into measuring, drawing lines, digging holes, and connecting the planks to the ground. But we decided that wasn’t really needed at this time to make a plan.

Back in our estimate, we thought about, at a really high level, how much time we thought some of these activities would take. We also thought about things like shipping time and took our USDA calendar into account.

These tasks are the key to our plan since we’ve made most of our decisions based on our thaw and last frost dates.  If the weather doesn’t cooperate, these are the date’s well change to re-calculate the balance of the plan, since most of everything else works backwards from here.

Other than things like shipping, rather than trying to work out how much time each item on our plan will take us to do, we allocated how much time we want to allow for each task. For example, we know starting our seeds indoors won’t take us a whole day, and it wont take us but an hour or so to make our online purchases (thanks to our list) so as long as it gets done within that day we’re fine.  In a project where you have multiple people working, or have smaller windows of time to work in, it’s better to estimate actual effort here. This time while working through the plan we needed to balance the curb appeal landscaping project with other life activities. So you’ll notice some activities calculated in days and others in hours.  This does funny things in MS Project and we get auto calculated duration for portions of days. You can round these if you like.

Task Name	Duration
Curb Appeal Landscaping Project	14.14 days
Plan Considerations	10.71 days
Decide key dates	0 days
Research material shipping times	0 days
Check availability for conflicts	0 days
Indoor planting dates	0 days
Thaw date	0 days
Last frost date	0 days
Estimation	0.64 days
Decide overall project approach	1 hr
Make materials list	1 hr
Check in house inventory	1 hr
Research materials cost	1 hr
Blog post / Journal	8 hrs
Buy	12.14 days
Mulch	2 hrs
Plants	2 hrs
Ground contact lumber	2 hrs
Lights	2 hrs
Build	8.43 days
Level garden area	4 hrs
Install Mulch	2 hrs
Install Walkways	8 hrs
Install Plants	2 hrs
Install lights	2 hrs
Plant	10.14 days
Harden starts outside	10 days
Transplant seedlings	2 hrs
Direct Sow	2 hrs
Vegetable Garden Update	10 days
Buy	10 days
Planting medium	0.07 days
Seeds	0.07 days
Plant stakes	1 hr
Build	9.57 days
Level garden area	4 hrs
Plant indoors	2 hrs
Harden indoor plants	2 hrs
Transplant indoor plants	4 hrs
Direct Sow outdoor plants	1 hr

Congratulations! You’re almost done. Planning out your gardening tasks and the time they’ll take is a huge part of the planning process. The last part is setting dates for all your activities. Since you know when your thaw and last frost dates are and you blocked off any non working days, you can start setting dependencies, which should, make your task plan turn into a real garden project plan.

Dependencies

If you’re going to use Microsoft project to do your planning, we’ll share couple of things we learned from an old project manager a long time ago.

• Always set a dependency for every task. For key tasks add a set of considerations that will allow them to start
• Finish to Finish (FF) tasks are tasks that can start independently at any time as long as they finish at the same time
• Finish to Start  (FS) are the default type task, you must finish task A before you start task B
• Start to start (SS) tasks must start at the same time, but can finish whenever
• Lead and use lead and lag time to make things land on the dates you want, don’t force an item to occur on a specific date

ID	Task Name	Predecessors
1	Curb Appeal Landscaping Project
2	Plan Considerations
3	Decide key dates
4	Research material shipping times
5	Check availability for conflicts
6	Indoor planting dates
7	Thaw date
8	Last frost date
9	Estimation
10	Decide overall project approach
11	Make materials list	10FF
12	Check in house inventory	10FF
13	Research materials cost	10FF
14	Blog post / Journal	10,11,12,13
15	Buy
16	Mulch	7FS-4 days
17	Plants	8FS+3 days
18	Ground contact lumber	7FS-4 days
19	Lights	8FS+3 days
20	Build
21	Level garden area	7
22	Install Mulch	7,16
23	Install Walkways	22,18,21
24	Install Plants	23,17
25	Install lights	24,19
26	Plant
27	Harden starts outside	8FS-10 days
28	Transplant seedlings	8
29	Direct Sow	8
30	Vegetable Garden Update
31	Buy
32	Planting medium	6
33	Seeds	6
34	Plant stakes	8
35	Build
36	Level garden area	39FS-6 days
37	Plant indoors	6
38	Harden indoor plants	37FS+6 days
39	Transplant indoor plants	8
40	Direct Sow outdoor plants	8

Dates

So here’s how to read this plan, the task Buy: Mulch must finish before the last frost date so we can level the area and install the mulch on time for transplanting. So we set a dependency on task ID 7 (Last frost date) and added a few days of lead time for shipping. We can of course start this task earlier if we have time (or money) but it must be complete before task 22 (install mulch).  We’re not going to torture you by writing about how every task is linked together,  you are welcome to ask any questions in our comments section or forum about planning your garden project.

Meanwhile, now that we know when we’re available, our milestones, what has to happen in what order and about how long all the things will take, we can start planning out dates.  This is one of the cool parts about using a tool like MS Project. The dates are a total autopilot GPS thing. Once you’ve wired in the previous bits the dates should just line up to your last frost and ground thaw dates and exclude your non working days like magic.

Task Name	Predecessors	Duration	Start	Finish
Curb Appeal Landscaping Project		14.14 days	Sat 3/9/19	Sat 5/18/19
Plan Considerations		10.71 days	Sat 3/9/19	Wed 5/1/19
Decide key dates		0 days	Sat 3/9/19	Sat 3/9/19
Research material shipping times		0 days	Sat 3/9/19	Sat 3/9/19
Check availability for conflicts		0 days	Sat 3/9/19	Sat 3/9/19
Indoor planting dates		0 days	Sat 3/16/19	Sat 3/16/19
Thaw date		0 days	Sat 4/6/19	Sat 4/6/19
Last frost date		0 days	Wed 5/1/19	Wed 5/1/19
Estimation		0.64 days	Sat 3/9/19	Sat 3/9/19
Decide overall project approach		1 hr	Sat 3/9/19	Sat 3/9/19
Make materials list	10FF	1 hr	Sat 3/9/19	Sat 3/9/19
Check in house inventory	10FF	1 hr	Sat 3/9/19	Sat 3/9/19
Research materials cost	10FF	1 hr	Sat 3/9/19	Sat 3/9/19
Blog post / Journal	10,11,12,13	8 hrs	Sat 3/9/19	Sat 3/9/19
Buy		12.14 days	Sat 3/16/19	Sat 5/18/19
Mulch	7FS-4 days	2 hrs	Sat 3/16/19	Sat 3/16/19
Plants	8FS+3 days	2 hrs	Sat 5/18/19	Sat 5/18/19
Ground contact lumber	7FS-4 days	2 hrs	Sat 3/16/19	Sat 3/16/19
Lights	8FS+3 days	2 hrs	Sat 5/18/19	Sat 5/18/19
Build		8.43 days	Sat 4/6/19	Sat 5/18/19
Level garden area	7	4 hrs	Sat 4/6/19	Sat 4/6/19
Install Mulch	7,16	2 hrs	Sat 4/6/19	Sat 4/6/19
Install Walkways	22,18,21	8 hrs	Sat 4/6/19	Sun 4/7/19
Install Plants	23,17	2 hrs	Sat 5/18/19	Sat 5/18/19
Install lights	24,19	2 hrs	Sat 5/18/19	Sat 5/18/19
Plant		10.14 days	Sun 3/10/19	Sat 5/4/19
Harden starts outside	8FS-10 days	10 days	Sun 3/10/19	Sun 4/28/19
Transplant seedlings	8	2 hrs	Sat 5/4/19	Sat 5/4/19
Direct Sow	8	2 hrs	Sat 5/4/19	Sat 5/4/19
Vegetable Garden Update		10 days	Sat 3/16/19	Sat 5/4/19
Buy		10 days	Sat 3/16/19	Sat 5/4/19
Planting medium	6	0.07 days	Sat 3/16/19	Sat 3/16/19
Seeds	6	0.07 days	Sat 3/16/19	Sat 3/16/19
Plant stakes	8	1 hr	Sat 5/4/19	Sat 5/4/19
Build		9.57 days	Sat 3/16/19	Sat 5/4/19
Level garden area	39FS-6 days	4 hrs	Sun 3/31/19	Sun 3/31/19
Plant indoors	6	2 hrs	Sat 3/16/19	Sat 3/16/19
Harden indoor plants	37FS+6 days	2 hrs	Sat 4/13/19	Sat 4/13/19
Transplant indoor plants	8	4 hrs	Sat 5/4/19	Sat 5/4/19
Direct Sow outdoor plants	8	1 hr	Sat 5/4/19	Sat 5/4/19

Status

To sum all of this up, If you’re doing this by hand it’s easy enough to figure, just make sure you don’t double book yourself for unavailable days. and keep your list up to date whenever you working through your planned activities.

A key measurement for the success of any project is to check your status regularly. Its super important to go back to your plan and check off complete tasks or re plan any late tasks.

If you’d like a copy of our project plan to do your own planning, let us know in the comments or on our forums.