Blog DIY – or hire a pro?
It’s happened to all of us… There is some niggling project around the house that you have been planning to attack for weeks or months and somehow just never got around to it. As the issue becomes a burr under someone’s saddle and conversations about the project tend to get more and more snarky, you are eventually faced with the choice of whether to do get off the couch and do the job yourself or bite the bullet and hire a professional to come in and do the job. (Continuing to listen to the Snark is frequently not a viable option.)
Here’s a newsflash-the charge for the professional service is always going to be more than you expected or think it should be and, contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t mean the tradesmen is stealing from you. People forget that the professional has business overhead to cover, has to allow for travel time to and from the job site, may or may not have to pull permits for the work, all of which is time-consuming and must be budgeted into his business day. That’s why the installation of a $20 plumbing fitting can cost several hundred dollars— they aren’t stealing from you, it’s just what’s required to support the business model. But this does leave us an opportunity to save some real money if we use careful decision making.
Doing the job yourself has the obvious attraction of reducing the out-of-pocket cost to materials and possibly a tool or two, but this could be where the good news ends. If you’ve never done the job before, you may be unaware of some really tricky pitfalls, the job will always take two or three times as long as you expect, involve several trips to and from the hardware store (to exchange the parts you thought would fit for the parts you really needed), and never be quite perfect. Unspecified members of the family will have various suggestions on how you should do it differently, followed up by other comments like I told you so… and you will see your mistakes every time you look at it for the rest of your life!
What is a person to do???
Fortunately, it is a very different world then when many of us were first learning these skills. It’s no longer necessary to do the job with the wrench in one hand and a book in the other, relying on incomprehensible instructions written with the common interesting misspellings and weird syntax. As the do it yourself trend has grown exponentially over the last 40 or 50 years, the tools to help have also gotten exponentially better. What are used to come in a plain brown box now comes with descriptions
and illustrations on the outside of the carton, owner’s manuals and installation instructions can be downloaded directly from the manufacture if they are lost or eaten by the dog, and most importantly we have access to the Internet and more specifically YouTube. One word of caution—Remember that no one is vetting the accuracy or safety of these resources (there are YouTube videos which purport to defy Einstein!) They must be used with care. Be sure to view several videos on any given task. If eight videos show the same way to perform the task, the probability that they are all wrong is pretty long odds. This gives you the opportunity to watch someone else do the job, get some sense of the complexity of the task, see the tools needed and decide whether you have or want them, and decide if you realistically have the skillset to do the job. Try using the following
yardstick–if the videos make sense, you understand the vocabulary and you recognize the tools, the task is probably worth tackling. If any of those pieces are NOT there, then the most sensible task is to pick up the phone.
I am an enthusiastic Do-It-Yourselfer, and whenever it appears to be a reasonable task I encourage people to tackle these things themselves. Nothing will increase your skill set (and your tool collection) more quickly than doing these jobs yourself. The money you save putting in an occasional two dollar outlet or $20 plumbing trap yourself will hopefully be there in the future when you have to call the professional in to unscrew whatever you screwed up. That happens to all of us too. Good luck!!