One and a half years ago I had an important decision to make, buy an apartment or build a house, as rent was no longer an option. Even though I knew that building a house is going to be a lot of work I decided to go on with the construction, in this article you can see how Evernote helped me along the way.
Working with the architect
We already had a project as we were starting up, but of course that we wanted to make changes. And we had meetings with the architect, exchanged a lot of emails, and more meetings and more emails. At this point I already saw that I need something to help me with all this information, and I created a new Evernote notebook (Household).
I’ve seen that the best way to communicate changes was to draw them right on top of the designs that the architect sent. I tried to draw using Paint, however Skitch did a much better job to get my point through.
Snapping documents
From the beginning I had to deal with payments, receipts and other “fun stuff”. Snapping a quick photo with my phone and saving it into Evernote. I found the Evernote widget very helpful to do this right from my Android homescreen.
Finding the constructor
After finishing up the work with the project I started looking for a constructor. Not sure about your country but in Romania these people don’t walk around with their tablets and send you terms and conditions via email. They rely a lot on discussion and little on the written word.
I know I am bad at reminding things and this is why I kept notes of the things we discussed. These notes were useful for me to take the decision on which constructor to work with.
Tracking issues
Things happen and changes need to be done. Because it is not very safe just to tell people to fix something hoping that they remember and take action, there is a high chance they will forget.
I used checklists to note the things that need to be fixed, like taking down a wall that does not belong :).
Contact manager
I don’t know about you but I have more than 1000 people in my address book. Saving another contact is like throwing it into a black hole. There were times when I lost people because I did not remember their name. 🙂
So instead I saved new contacts as notes and put them into Evernote with the contacts tag.
Reference material
There were a lot of things that I did not understand as we were progressing with the construction, like which one is best, fiberglass or cellulose. So I started googleing and I put everything that I found useful into Evernote. Evernote Clearly and the web clipper were very handy.
Where Evernote does not shine
Evernote was helpful but I cannot say that it was a silver bullet for me, there are things in which Google Drive does a much better job, things like:
- Managing expenses
- Storing lots of pictures
- File management
What’s your experience
What about you, did you use Evernote while under construction or while doing a renovation. Tell me about your experience in the comments bellow.