I’ve been told (by a plumber) that DIY gas appliance work ends in a BOOM very often. Never happened to me. I’ve also been told gas water heater installation requires a permit. Never thought to get a permit.
I love living in the country. When I had a guy put a deck on my last house, I asked if a permit was needed. He chuckled. Told me if I wanted he’d get one, but he only usually bothered with one if he was working “in town”.
How often really? It probably ends in hiring a pro often once leaking gas is smelled. BOOMs tend to get covered on the local news.
I know how to change a tire and I suppose I might have done it when I was younger - but nope, not now . I may or may not be strong enough to do it at this point, but I definitely don’t want to get dirty and I have a AAA membership
This. I can change a tire easily. I can pull the dead battery from my car and buy and install a new one, or charge the old one. But I have a AAA membership and it would be weird to never make use of it.
Vegetable gardening is a passion of mine. I love our next door neighbor to death, but she really doesn’t get it sometimes. Recently questioned me on why I was “wasting” my time doing all that back breaking work planning, tilling, weeding, planting, watering, harvesting, and canning, when I could simply go to the store and buy a can of green beans for about a dollar. I explained to her that in terms of saving money, I probably break even when it comes to growing vegetables, when you consider the capital expenses like building materials for raised beds, buying garden tools and equipment, and the supplies needed for home canning. But the profit in my eyes was doing something outside I enjoy, and working towards some degree of food security (we didn’t have to worry about the canned goods shortages that cropped up when covid first hit) and food safety (I know exactly what gets put into the organically grown plants in my yard. Can’t say that about stuff bought at the grocery store). Plus it’s a form of physical activity or exercise. Lastly, it allows me to do something that produces very tangible and often satisfying results; something that’s usually very lacking in my job.
Because of my career in construction and maintenance, I can (or could) do most things myself, including electrical work. As has been mentioned, it’s a judgment call as to whether or not one wants to tackle the job or spend the time on it. I didn’t even try major repairs, like when the sewer line broke. HVAC: call a pro. I know that tiling is supposed to be fairly easy, but I always farmed that out. Most anything that would normally require a permit got done by a pro, even if I could have done it myself.
Gardening: I built raised beds, dug up lawn (a truly onerous chore), trimmed, pruned, weeded, etc. But we hired a gardener toward the end, as it was just getting to be very labor-intensive. What he could do in a day or two would have taken us a week or more and possibly resulted in back strains.
I still do minor things in my dotage: I installed under-cab lighting in the kitchen, for instance. But most chores of that sort are handled by in-house maintenance folks.
I am comfortable tackling small jobs and minor repairs around the house, such as changing a light switch or fixture, repairing/updating the toilet tank innards, fixing a screen, etc. I assess the need and determine what the cost could be if I F it up, and if I am Ok with that risk, I give it a try. If I succeed, then I pat myself on the back for the money I saved, and if it goes sideways, I can get someone else to fix my mistakes and be happy to pay them (and have learned something). If something falls outside of that risk assessment, like if it involves tall ladders (such as roof repair), I just go ahead and have a pro handle it.
I am pretty handy with bicycles and take care of all maintenance, tune-ups, and parts replacements myself, as long as I have the right tools on-hand. Youtube is really handy for bike work for anything I am unfamiliar with. I can watch a 5 minute video of something and determine pretty quickly if what I intend to do is out of my league and better suited for the bike shop.
I can and still do the straight forward stuff: install a light fixture, replace a breaker, install a new faucet, assemble IKEA type furniture. But that’s about it, anything that is “meant” to be DIY with very simple tools.
I’ve done more building and electrical type stuff in the past (set construction & lighting) so I know what’s going on. I feel I am knowledgeable enough to know what I don’t know and shouldn’t attempt. It also get down to “do I have to buy tools to do this?” I respect that a Pro has the expertise to know the “gotcha” stuff and has the tools. And I am fortunate at this point in my life to have the money to pay for it.
I’m generally willing to get dirty and take things apart and figure it out with two exceptions: plumbing and electric. I have limited knowledge of those fields and there is just too much potential (ha!) for a total disaster. I leave those to the professionals unless it’s really really easy and doesn’t involve anything more than simple hand tools. Once something needs soldering, I’m out.
I tend to do most things on our home myself because I can do them, and I do better quality work. However, I am slower than a crew. So, if I need something done relatively quickly, like remodeling a kitchen (it sucks to be without it for too long), I’ll pay for it done and do frequent inspections. I’ve completely remodeled our basement which includes moving walls, electrical, plumbing (jackhammering to move drains), replacing windows, putting in two new egress windows (I paid for the foundation cutting), flooring, etc.
For our vehicles, I try to do our own oil changes, filter changes, replace bulbs, etc. With a Subaru, it is super easy to change the oil and filter…no tools required, so I don’t know why you would pay someone to do it.
It’s amazing how bicycles (and kayaks) maintain their value over time. I bought a used “mountain bike” 14 years ago for $25. I used the bike maybe once every other year since then. Last weekend I decided I’d gotten my $25 out of the bike and took it to a local bicycle shop to see if they could use it for parts (instead of putting it in my dumpster). The guy gave me $20!
Likewise kayaks. I’ve purchased 20 different kayaks over the years for different reasons, all but one were used. Out of those 20 I still have three. The others I resold after using them, every time for more than I paid.
Agree. We have “large item” pickup of junk from residential areas in my city that people can schedule, and occasionally I will see someone included a bicycle or two in their curbside pile headed for the landfill. If it looks in decent shape, I’ll snag it, take it home and refurbish it (usually all that’s needed is just a bath and a simple tune-up and lube), and turn around to sell it on craigslist. I suspect most of the time the bike has been sitting somewhere collecting dust and the person just wants it gone. I have picked-up free bikes from craigslist and just cleaned them up and sold them cheap the same way - it helps that I like working on bikes and always learn something from each little job. If it looks clean and everything is working, people will buy it. If no one wants to buy it, I can donate it.
I stopped doing my own oil changes shortly after it became uncool to dump the used oil on the ground in an unused corner of the backyard.
IMO the used oil disposal is the only long pole in the DIY oil change tent; the rest is trivially easy on almost all cars. But that’s a very long and very messy pole. I pay it done mostly so it’s drained right into their catch tank, not smeared all over the inside of my car or trunk as I drive around trying to find somebody willing to take used oil in half-assed containers.
I’ve heard that legally any company that sells motor oil must take used motor oil. I don’t know if that’s true but even if it is, many auto parts stores disagree.
I pour the used oil back in the 1 qt oil containers, put them back in the 6 pack box I buy them in (Costco puts the Castrol synthetic oil on sale a couple times a year for a steal), then take it to the landfill once a year (they accept used oil). We only go about 9000 miles a year so that is either one or two boxes, once a year to deal with. We go to the landfill at least once a year so it works for us.
If you have a Subaru and don’t know how easy it is to change the oil and filter, with no tools required beyond the oil catchpan and a funnel, here is how: The oil filter is up top and you twist off with your hands. Take out the drain plug and replace with a ball-cock valve (you’ll need a new crush washer).
I use old oil in my chainsaws (probably not a great idea) as well as for burning stumps (probably not a great idea).
Back when I was a kid, used motor oil was a common persistent weed killer poured along fence lines all throughout my part of suburbia. With cars needing oil changes every 3000 miles, there was a lot of used oil available to every Dad on the block.
My, but did we grow up in … innocent … times.
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.
It was also claimed back in the day, that “burnt oil” would cure a dog of mange.
Reminds me of this scene from Fight Club:
