Like others here, the list of things I have done (or might have done if needed) includes a lot of things discussed above, but the list of things I’ll do these days, at age 67, is considerably smaller.
For instance, for most of the 12+ years I drove on track, I changed my own brake pads because 1) I wore the pads out quickly, 2) paying someone to do it that frequently would have been very expensive and time-consuming, 3) I could be confident that the job was done properly (important in that context) and 4) on the 350Z it wasn’t all that hard. I also did other track-related tasks, like replacing the rotors and brake fluid and installing sway bars. And for most of my adult life I did the oil changes in most of my cars.
I haven’t been in track in more than ten years, and although I’ve toyed with the idea of changing the pads on the Lexus, I’ve watched the videos: it looks harder than it was on my track car, and I no longer have a nice level space to work on the car. So when I get it done next, I’ll have a pro do it. And that’s also why I take both cars to the quick oil change place these days.
After I got married 12 years ago and moved into my wife’s 100-year-old house, I had to learn about things like knob-and-tube wiring (which I never touched) and old plumbing fixtures. At first I was horrified by the prospect of having to try and fix some of these things, but by the time we moved, two years later, I was disappointed that I wouldn’t have more time to tackle some of its challenges. I replaced toilets, at least one sink, hooked up a new gas oven (no boom), and did various other minor repairs and updates.
In our last house I painted the dining room, but that’s a task I no longer care to handle. Doing it right entails lots of painstaking prep, which is tedious. Fortunately, in our current place we’ve found a painter who does great work and very reasonable prices.
When we moved into my mother-in-law’s 70-year-old house two years ago, I changed all the interior door knobs with lever handles, and replaced the old-style light switches, some of which were original ceramic units, with new decorator style. The old-style plumbing here confounded me, which is why we hired a plumber to install two bathroom sinks I might otherwise have done myself. But I did install two new toilets.
In addition to age, there is one more factor that affects whether I’ll do a job myself: the WAF, aka Wife Approval Factor. This is often discussed in relation to things like buying a new giant TV set, but in this context perhaps it should be called the WDF.
Case in point: four of the circuits in the house are ungrounded and have two-pronged outlets. These are obviously inconvenient for plugging in things with three prongs, and one solution is to change the breakers to GFCI and replace the outlets with standard three-prong ones (appropriately labelled). I’ve never done any work inside a breaker box, but the videos made it look relatively simple. Left to myself, I probably would have done it. But I knew that if I mentioned it to my wife, she would have been very anxious about my electrocuting myself. And doing it without her knowledge, when she wasn’t there, would have been risky if something went wrong.
So just yesterday I had electricians install the new breakers, then I went and bought 20 three-prong decorator outlets, which I will install throughout the house over the next week or so.
Finally, a good reason to do any of these jobs is that you will enjoy it. As I related elsewhere, I recently built a prop milk wagon for my wife’s school production of Fiddler on the Roof. We couldn’t find one to borrow or rent, and there were a few somewhat appropriate ones that we might have bought. But I really enjoyed building it from scratch myself. And I’ll probably be building a few other big props/set pieces for the show, too.