Dan, thinking back on "the old days," I was reminded of the way we did projects in those times. Car in garage, buds coming over to lend a hand, drinking some beers and, er, well, we'll just leave it at the beers. On some evenings, we did more BSing than real work, depending on a lot of variables, and did a lot of work on other evenings and hung out later.
The funny thing is that this was the way we all did projects back then.