If all of the trades were there on the same day and each could begin their work immediately after the prior specialist had finished it might have taken a day or

If all of the trades were there on the same day and each could begin their work immediately after the prior specialist had finished it might have taken a day or a few, but it sounds like much of that month was simply waiting. If you're handy and in a part of the world where you can just do all of this work yourself at your own pace its no surprise you can be much faster. NYC is a famously difficult place to have work like this done, especially in a shared-ownership building like a condo. You need your neighbors to agree its okay to do, your board/management company needs to review and be satisfied with the insurance your contractors carry, the city has requirements for electrical that always require permits and often require a master electrician to do the work, and even once the work starts the walls and spaces you're working in aren't exclusively yours and your contractors will be discovering things along the way... plumbing for that spigot you didn't know your neighbor had on their terrace, roof drains, etc. The process of just getting approval to do work can vary from "chill but time consuming" in small buildings to "impenetrable bureaucracy so don't bother if you're not using the approved vendors" in large co-ops. Once it starts, that master electrician you hired to run the 220v service isn't gonna waste his time repairing drywall, a cheaper subcontractor will do that, and the latency just cranks up from there I love city living and understand that most of these rules and regulations exist because bad things happened when they didn't - frankly I wouldn't trust most of my neighbors in buildings I've lived in to do their own electrical work or pierce the building's envelope for any reason - but also sort of understand where the outsider's perception that city homeowner life is hard and expensive comes from. It very often is, by comparison.