I find that up until the drywall taping, the scheduling is fairly straightforward. The finishing stages need more return visits, and steps partially complete before we can move ahead and come back to finish a stage. Painting is the best example of this. It does take some trick schedule work to fit all the moving pieces together. Adding in multiple houses and you are doubling the schedule work. This is the approach I like to take once the walls are primed.
- install interior doors, trim work (casing and baseboard), baseboards in carpet areas
- install all cabinetry
- template counters
- ---- this is where we are ---
- prep for trim and door paint (spray crew)
- spray interior trim and doors (spray crew)
- install counters (preferably right now is the time to do this but it can be later) (kitchen shop)
- taping crew returns to do the first touchup (a lot of damage on walls from carpentry, deliveries, tools, etc). (drywall contractor)
- first wall paint, closet and bathrooms can be painted twice (wall paint crew)
- tile all areas (tile contractor)
- do all finished electrical work, but reserve all the cover plates (note we try and paint the bathrooms with two coats so we can put wall lights on) (electricians)
- install plumbing fixtures (plumber)
- install flooring (hardwood and carpet)
- final railings
- glass work
- paint walls final coat (wall paint crew)
- lockout, doors, handles, hardware (finishers)
- appliances install including gas and water to fridge and stove (plumber)
So this is a general list of order of operations for the finishing work, looking at this list it is reasonable to say I am still at the very beginning of the finishing. Each bullet represents at least a work day, and possibly multiple work days (tiling is the largest job here by time). A list in a spreadsheet is a terrible way to schedule a job with all of these tasks, so I put it into my schedule program. Due to the large number of dates involved, and multiple people that need to agree to my dates, I don't want to have this all in my memory (which I will surely forget or confuse). Now that I have embedded dates all the way up to the plumber, I can refer to my cell phone at any time and remind myself who has committed to what date.
Having activity in each house every day is nearly impossible to orchestrate for a smaller builder. There just is not enough leverage over the crews compared to a production builder that has dozens of sequential jobs. We may have to tolerate some small gaps where no progress is made, but we can't allow work to stack up so tight such that one variable causes a cascade of failures like a domino effect. Overall the schedule is moving along nicely.
This is what the schedule looks like from this point forward.
The gantt chart is most helpful to make sense of the schedule as you approach a deadline.