Pacing through home renovations

This next few months will probably be the hardest period of pacing I've ever had to do! I've just bought a house with my brother and his family (his wife is one of my best friends since I was a kid). Long term they will live in the main house, and I will have a custom built accessible annex.

Short term....we have to rennovate the whole house - everything from floors to heating and electrics, bathroom and kitchen, etc. So to get through it without my health (PoTS and hypermobility) spiraling down, I've got to pace like never before!

I guess the first thing is living in a rented room - so I'm not on site all the time - and can always get away from the chaos.

My main role is admin/organising contractors - so I'm not expected to be doing manual labour or anything. Various contractors, my brother, and various other friends and family will be doing the manual stuff.....

....Only....

...I LOVE doing fixing things, DIY and flat-pack furniture! And there's a lot I can do at the house - but only in small doses. If the doses are just right, it might even help me get stronger! So a blanket 'no manual work' isn't actually constructive. But if I overdo it, it will be crash and burn/injuries/months of recovery time. So looking after my health for the next few months is going to take a huge amount of self control and strategic planning.

On Saturday I started as I meant to go on: I set myself a maximum time permitted on site. And when I arrived, I told everyone I had to leave at 12, as well as setting an alarm. (Everyone else telling you to go means 'ignoring the alarm' is not so easily done :D )

And it worked. I went home, achy and tired - but not utterly exhausted, and not injured.

I also have a rule that 'No manual work until I feel in full control of my muscles again' (fatigue proper turns me into a rag doll). Yesterday I felt 'not properly recovered', so I popped in to agree some electrical spec with my brother - and went straight home again afterwards.

And my plan for helping myself keep to this rule is: Wear office/nice clothes (especially skirts and stuff I don't want to get dirt and paint on) if I'm just dropping in, or if I've assessed myself as 'not ready for physical work'. That way I have a physical reminder/barrier to getting over enthusiastic and working when my body isn't ready/capable.

It means making my decisions on how ready my body is in advance - and for me that is much more effective than 'in the moment' when I can get easily carried away.

This morning I'm in smart office clothes. But this afternoon/evening I will reassess, and hopefully will be good to switch to overalls and do a bit of scraping wallpaper off the walls. For a set length of time. (My 'base layer' of clothes is suitable for either outfit, so the nice clothes to manual labour outfit change is minimal effort too).

So on the face of it I'm well prepared....but I'm also still learning how to handle my massive fluctuations in capacity around B12 deficiency - 1 month high capacity (for me) - one month steadily declining, then a B12 injection, and back to high capacity. On repeat. So that's bound to catch me out a few times.

I'm sure there will be plenty of ups and downs and lessons learned, but here's to an interesting few months!