Taking lessons from agile development home

I learned quite a bit in the software world can be applied to the real world as well.  Today, we will talk about one project which I've managed to totally screw up due to poor story planning.

The overall epic was this - I got some snow wheels/tires for my car, and was going to store the summer wheels/tires at my parents or in-laws garage at some point in the next few weeks.  In the meanwhile, I'd put them in a corner of my house.  Today, I worked on the story of "Move the wheels from the car to my house so that I can use my trunk until I make time to go to parents house".  The problem was in my tasking.  I looked for what I thought to be the most efficient way to solve this story, but not thinking about the risks to the overall epic.

My tasks were:

1. Move car to front of house where snow is clear
2. Move all tires to the front porch
3. Bring one tire at a time up to spot in second bedroom where they can live.

It seems pretty reasonable.  I wanted to do it his way so I wouldn't have to go inside and outside and change shoes/track snow in the house.  This unfortunately was a huge mistake.  I did not complete the research story of "exactly how heavy is a tire+wheel".  Instead, I got a feel for it bringing them to the front porch and thought "Not bad".  BUT - when I brought the first one up two flights of stairs in the house, I realized this was going to be tough.  After bringing the second one up, I'm now exhausted, and am in a half complete story.  The rear tires are 15 pounds heavier than the front tires.  The story is half done.  Getting the tires back in the car will be a pain now.  I don't want to bring them back downstairs.

So - what should I have done?  Realize how heavy the rear tires were and then break the story down even more!  If I treated each tire, or even the first tire as an individual story, it would be easier for me to have backed out.  I could have decided "Well - bringing all of these out of hte car and upstairs is a terrible idea.  Let's think of a new story, ie - find a friend local who has a garage to store these at temporarily" Or even try make time today to just bring them to a parents house and complete the epic.

My takeaway - even in agile development, don't forget about the end goal that the stories come to.  If a task makes progress but doesn't make sense, stop and replan.  Don't finish something for the sake of finishing something.   So what are your stories of life lessons where better planning and making stories smaller would have been better for you?  Also, any advice on hiding these from the Mrs. so I can just leave them at my home?