You and your spouse have purchased a foreclosure you hope to flip for a profit. The two bathrooms had been recently remodeled by the previous owners. The three bedrooms need only cosmetic work - something you decide to undertake yourself. The majority of your budget will be used for remodeling the kitchen, the dining room, and the family room.
Since this is your first flip, you've hired an experienced home inspector to help you scope the project. You want to track costs carefully to stay as close to budget as possible and to give you an accurate baseline for similar work in future flips. Rather than doing a hierarchical decomposition of the project into various products/outcomes and then adding work package descriptors for each lowest-level product/outcome, you chose to list the components that needed work and then describe the work that must be completed for each of these components. NOTE: Assume your descriptions of the work that must be completed for each of the components are work package descriptors and that these work package descriptors are NOT decomposed into lower level elements.
Some of the work may have to take a higher priority if cost issues arise during the renovation. The higher priority work includes modifications to the electrical, HVAC, and plumbing systems, removal of two walls to provide an open concept arrangement, and common flooring throughout the kitchen, family room, and dining room areas. The quality of other finishes in the kitchen, dining room, and/or family room may have to be reduced if the cost of the higher priority work becomes an issue.
You decide to work backwards from your current list of work (shown below) to develop a WBS. You start by adding an element that represents the entire project and numbering it zero. You also decide to add several control accounts so that you can monitor and manage costs more effectively. These control accounts include:
- Higher Priority Work
- Lower Priority Work
- Utilities and Services (Electrical, HVAC, and Plumbing)
- Wall Removals
- Kitchen
- Dining Room (DR)
- Family Room (FR)