I am not the fixer in the family, that would be my husband. Since he was a plumber & electrician when I met him, and went on to build our entire house himself (we had some laborer and large machinery help plus some finish cabinetry), he ended up knowing how to fix almost everything there is to fix. We’ve saved many tens of thousands (starting with the entire house).
I design things (I designed the house), and I sew and mend. That’s about it for me.
When I was 17 the dryer in our family home stopped working. I had begun to demonstrate some mechanical aptitude so my dad told me that if I could fix it, he’d pay me what he’d pay a repairman. He handed me some sort of Readers Digest book on home repair and told me he thought it might be the door switch. As a side note, my dad did NOT have any mechanical aptitude. I didn’t know it when I was young, but as an adult I got seriously concerned about one of his crappy “repairs” and gave him a safety lecture. ( he had spliced a wire with freaking duct tape on the roof of the garage, and the bedroom outlets cut out whenever someone opened the garage door. The ceiling was wood and I freaked out about the fire hazard).
But anyway, the “symptoms” didn’t Indicate a bad door switch. I looked behind the dryer and realized one leg of the 208v power feed had pulled loose. I reconnected it. The whole process took 5 minutes. My dad gave me 50 bucks, which was a lot of money for a 17 year old in 1974.
When I moved in here with my gf she was embarrassed by how old her dryer was. A year or two later, it stopped drying. Thanks to YouTube, I figured out what part I needed. Thanks to Amazon it arrived a few days later. I fixed the dryer and my gf was pissed off (she had planned on buying a new one that weekend).
A few months later, the linter screen disintegrated. I ordered a replacement. She was unhappy.
A few years later, the drum stopped turning. She was ecstatic! I quietly ordered a replacement belt and got it working again. When I told her the dryer worked again she just glared at me.
A few years later we were at Lowe’s for some reason and she bought a new dryer. I advertised the old dryer as free to a good home and someone picked it up a day or two later. It is probably still working. I despise the new dryer; too many unnecessary bells and whistles.
Are you me?
From the YouTube comment to the dryer repair, I could have said the exact same thing. My dryer repair was some little coil near the igniter, something that a pro would have charged a bundle to diagnose and replace, but YouTube taught me to fix.
I didn’t change a power window, but did change the HID headlights in my VW.
The dealer was quoting a price of several hundred dollars to change the bulbs, some of that the high cost of the lamps and the rest labor.
And they weren’t making up the bit about the labor–to change those bulbs requires taking apart every bit of trim in the front half of the car. I was able to buy the lamps online for $50 each, much less than the auto parts store or dealer. Then I spent an afternoon with a friend taking the car apart and putting it back together, following a nice YouTube video that showed the whole thing.
The on/off button in my mother’s washing machine died. Middlebro realized it was interchangeable with another button that we never used, moved the never-used button to the on/off spot, ta-dah! We hope to get another 5-6 years out of that washing machine.
I recently fixed 90% of the “this computer is so slow” problems in my mother’s house by installing a wifi repeater. 25€ and half an hour or so of cursing at whomever came up with those horrible network passwords (I don’t change them because then nobody can remember the new one or find the place where it is written, and I’m not allowed to just write it on the wall :p).
The list would be very long, so I am not going to.
Retired after 43 as a stationary Engineer where I fixed stuff and kept buildings running.
Saving money on repairs and upgrades is, IMHO, as important to providing for my family as bringing home a salary. It all results in more money for other things. I have fixed cars (pretty much anything that can be reasonably done on my driveway - no full engine or transmission teardown), gutted and remodeled 2 bathrooms (including building a new dual vanity countertop from scratch), completely replaced a 10 x 11 second floor deck, installed tile and wood flooring, built a walk-in closet in the master bedroom, repaired furnaces, built an exterior basement door (non-standard size, big box retailers wanted $$$$ for a custom door. I spent about $100), built a floor-to-ceiling 10’ wide entertainment center for our living room, repaired and run home wiring, the list goes on. I have, over the years, saved tens of thousands of dollars by doing stuff myself.
Mine was also a heat problem many years ago. I owned a house with an oil fired boiler and radiators throughout. I’d never lived in a place with radiators, and I couldn’t understand why the ones on the 2nd floor were cold.
Recently, I’d bought a DIY guide for miscellaneous things around the house, so I looked up radiator heating. Turns out, there was almost no water in the pipes. And suddenly, I knew what the little gizmo was that the previous owners had left behind - it was a key to turn on the bleed valve in each radiator.
So I turned on the water that fed the pipes and following the recommendations in the book, I bled the entire system of air. In no time, I had plenty of heat! Plus I was warmed by personal achievement! 
I can’t imagine what a service call would have cost me on the first really cold day of the year…
Among other things, changing the headlights on my Toyota Yaris.
I will be a Toyota man until they day I die, but my god are they finicky little machines. Changing the headlamp in my Yaris requires almost complete dismantling of the front end, to say nothing of having to twist your hand into a cockamamie angle and risk pulling a muscle.
The job would have cost $200 at a shop in labor alone. Did it myself for about ten bucks (the cost of the bulb).
I have always liked to understand how things work, ever since I was little. Usually, if I can figure out how something is supposed to work, I can figure out how to fix it if it breaks.
Being curious about how things work is one of the reasons I became an engineer, I suppose.
The list of things that I have fixed myself and saved a ton of money would be very, very long. I used to do all of my own car repairs, including a couple of engine swaps (required bribing a couple of friends with beer to do the heavy lifting part, but everything else I did myself). I have fixed washing machines, dryers, stoves, all kinds of stuff around the house. I have replaced ceiling fans, rewired parts of the house, and over the past couple of decades have replaced just about every original electrical outlet that was in the house (it was built in 1960 and almost all of the electrical outlets have cracked and broken over the last 20 years).
One thing I suck at is plumbing. Fortunately, my neighbor is a plumber, so I do tech support for all of his computers (and his kid’s computers) and he does plumbing stuff for me.
The older I get, the less enthusiastic I am about car repairs, so I will often let a shop do the work these days, which is something I would have almost never done a couple of decades ago. It’s hard finding a decent mechanic where I live though. They all do crappy work and charge way too much for it. So when the exhaust rusted through on my old truck last year, I fixed it myself, even though I hate doing exhaust work (just picture how rusted everything is on a 25 year old truck with 200k+ miles - the only way to get bolts off is to break them). I just warned my wife that there was going to be a lot of swearing involved, and that I probably wouldn’t be in a very good mood afterwards.
Heh. My wife can sympathize with your gf.
We had a GE dryer when we moved into our current house (20 years ago). Lesson learned - GE appliances suck. Don’t ever buy one. It broke. I fixed it. About a year later, it broke again. I fixed it. It broke a third time. I fixed it. It broke a fourth time, and my wife told me to stop fixing the damned thing and just buy a new one. I forget the order that things broke, but I replaced the belt, door switch, timer, thermal fuse, and one of the heating elements before my wife made me get a new one.
Same thing with our stove. Again, I forget the order, but I replaced the oven temperature sensor (technically it didn’t break - it got ruined in an accidental grease fire after we spilled grease from a turkey one thanksgiving), the oven timer, the oven heating element (burned itself out a few years after the oven fire), a couple of the burner connectors that had rusted out, and one of the burner controllers. I forget what the last straw was, but something broke on it and my wife absolutely forbade me from fixing it one more time.
I was going to say, with a user name like that, I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!
Of course!