[collyw]

"It should only take you 2 or 3 hours".

Estimates are almost always under.

As you point out the most basic project setup takes time. And I am working on a home laptop, not my work machine, so I don't have everything installed in the same way as I do for a work setup (that's usually at least a days work in itself on a new work machine).

Also it is not uncommon to find some strange issue that will take a couple of hours to fix if you are unfamiliar with it. Last technical test I had involved using Django's chache framework. I have used Django a lot, but not really used the cache in depth. I got everything working in the end and they failed me for the most trivial reasons.