Do you pay someone or do it yourself?
I was reading My Open Wallet and noticed she has a “My Rules” section in the sidebar. I hadn’t noticed before and the DIY vs. Pay one caught my eye.
There is very little that we pay others to do. At our first house, we did a number of things ourselves:
- removed carpet and padding
- installed (fake) hardwood flooring in three rooms and a hallway
- removed carpet and padding to prepare for new carpet
- installed a garbage disposal
- removed a toilet and sink from bathroom
- replaced said toilet and sink
- laid new floor in the bathroom
- painted
I may have forgotten something here or there. But that saved us a LOT of money by doing it ourselves. The flooring alone would have cost a lot. My DH and two friends did it and the pay was food and beer. Oh I think DH gave one guy $50.
We did pay for some things:
- installing of a carpet
- a plumber after everything I tried with the sink wouldn’t work
- a house cleaner for after our stuff was out of the house and days before we were moving
- a landscaper for a final cleanup when we were moving
- an electrician because we weren’t sure we did something right
And of course paying for a couple of things proved to be annoying. More on that later.
Living here has provided us some things to do one our own as well. We plan on:
- painting – the entire house needs it as it came with the bland white/offwhite color that new houses come with
- installing a patio
- changing the backporch to have a covering over the bottom
- installing a fence
The fence is a tricky one. A couple of neighbors have offered to help, and I know we will take them up on it, but it is a few thousand dollars and definitely not a priority right now. Friends of ours had their fence installed for them, which puts the cost at about twice what you would if you did it yourself. Sweat equity is payment enough for us!
So for us, if we can do it ourselves, we will. Cleaning the house isn’t that fun, but we think the money could be better spend elsewhere so we still do it ourselves. I did pay a teenager two or three times over the summer to mow the lawn, but considering you need to mow about every 10 days, two or three times wasn’t much.
If I could pay for something to be done, it would be cleaning the house. Actually, sweeping and mopping, and cleaning the kitchen would be good enough. The rest of it I really don’t mind all that much.
Oh I forgot about stuff outside of the house! Let’s see, I sew so I do everything necessary for DH’s uniforms (which for one set would end up costing at least $30), I am fairly handy with a car and did some minor work on it earlier this year. We had a friend change our oil for us.
Of course doing things yourself can cause sticker shock when you go to pay for something. Regardless of me not having a clue of how to service our heating/cooling unit, I still took a breath when I was told it would cost $125 per servicing. I’m sure it is worth it, but we’ve never had to pay for that kind of servicing before (WA State houses rarely have air considitioners, at least the area we lived in didn’t. LOL).
December 1st, 2006 at 5:11 pm
[...] I mentioned in my diy vs pay someone else post that it was annoying to pay a couple of the people that we had in our “we paid people to do this” column. [...]