I find the opposite. If you want something done right you have to do it yourself. I try to only pay for labor when it's low/medium skill labor paired with a capital investment I don't want to make (e.g. getting new tires on my car and an alignment) or when I'm paying for a member of a professional club for their reputation and club membership (e.g. a lawyer or realtor)
Building a solid structure is a high skill job! Not as complex as building an application but definitely comparable.
I think some people fail to understand how hard it is to be a good contractor. Just like software engineering it requires a lot of education and a lot of experience.
You won't get it right your first few tries no matter how smart you are. Just like no software developer ever got things right when they were first learning to code.
Getting my house remodeled I realized that the contractors do probably 50x as much math as I do on a daily basis, and I'm the one with a math degree. Go figure.
Building one structure is a series of low skill tasks.
Building many structures (or any given sub-specialty, e.g. plumbing) on a predetermined schedule and budget and making money doing it without charging so much money that you get undercut out of business is what requires skill.
For N=1 you rarely have to be a pro to do it right.
? If you're doing that much reduction in your estimation, couldn't the same be said for software?
The labor itself might be low skill, but the experience required to do the job well and to create a lasting structure takes an enormous amount of time. "should I use ceder, spruce, pine or Aztek for the exterior door casings? Should my subsill be 7 degrees or 14? Should I use felt paper or tyvek for my weather barrier, which type of tape should I use for each type?"
> If you're doing that much reduction in your estimation, couldn't the same be said for software?
And this is why companies hire a hundred fresh grads for every gray hair. 99x/100 they don't need super high quality work output.
In all trades there's a hesitation to look at something and say "screw it, it doesn't really matter, just do what's cheap" unless you're being told to and software isn't immune from that (in software "told do" seems to come mostly in the form of time pressure whereas in the trades it's what the number job is paying). Sure it's nice to do "good" high quality work but a lot of the time it really isn't necessary or it's strictly wrong because whatever it is you're building needs to be built to a price point. It's only when you push things to the limit do all the little marginal details (the stuff the experienced pros get right) start mattering. That tends to accidentally happen more (at least in my estimation) in software than the trades because labor is so expensive and code is so easily portable.
Also, janky setups and quick-n-dirty fixes abound in all trades. You just only see them in trades you know about.
Not really sure why you are being downvoted. My own experience aligns with what you are describing. For most residential work a homeowner can do a solid job as long as you are handy and willing to spend a little time familiarizing yourself with building codes and the appropriate techniques. Being a professional means being able to estimate accurately, meet those estimates, manage multiple jobs, etc.
If timeline isn't the most critical factor a homeowner can do an excellent job. Often even better than the professionals because you will be willing to spend extra time and attention to get everything perfect.
>> but one of the reasons for the cheap labor junior guy is to run to home depot.
And then get the wrong stuff, which the contractor will make do anyway if there's even the remote possibly it will work. and so on. After a while and some $$$ wasted you will get a feel for what's reasonable and what's bogus.
You speak pretty definitively on the topic. I'm guessing you have some experience with construction that's worth sharing? Would love to hear a positive story of how it turned out!
I spent a few years doing under the table construction and also picked up the skills to work on mechanical things around the same time. Then I went to college, got a career and spent some money picking up the skills required to work in metal. Electrical and plumbing (not just for water) are things you kind of have to pick up along the way. I'm no means a professional at any of these skills because I don't get 40hr of practice a week. Nor am I unique. A lot of successful people from blue collar backgrounds wind up with similar skills. Even though I have software money now I couldn't afford to pay people to build the things I can build myself.
I became a homeowner as a never-interested DIY with EE/CS degrees. We had an unfinished basement that we paid the builder to finish only the electrical, plumbing, and framing. I'd always heard drywall'ing was easy so I left that for me to do.
At the time I knew nothing about lighting, fixtures, eletrical work, etc. Ended up agreeing to J-boxes for basement lights rather than cans, and a few other money-saving things (for the electrician).
Before doing the drywall myself, I ended up rerunning all the basement lights, running tons of outlets, installed an electrical subpanel in my garage, new plumbing lines, etc. All inspected and approved on my own permits.
I maybe watched ~200 hours on youtube (easy to do at 2x speed) and read a lot of electrical and plumbing code. But when I was done it was "done right" and not done to "save money".
I ended up saving a ton of money on the electrical and plumbing, easily in the thousands, and only saved $700 on the drywall labor. Moral of the story, don't hang your own drywall by yourself. Pay for it if you can't get a couple friends to help.
Electrical and plumbing are relatively easy compared to anything that requires accurate measuring and cutting.
The latter can really kill a project if you can't get it right consistently, preferably first time.
That's where the skill comes in - not just the physical labour, but the experience needed to make allowances for material tolerances and other possible gotchas.
Professionals (should) have that knack, amateurs rarely will.
Generally all contractors say "the next guys will take care of that". For example, when framing you don't really care if the studs are really straight or if the walls are square. The "next guy" will take care of that.
True enough, when I was drywalling I had the builder come back to take care of some bowed studs that should never have been used.
I've also volunteered at Habitat for Humanity and can confirm that very little "accurate measuring and cutting" was occurring. They'd quickly measure some things, shout out numbers, and then use a circular saw to rough cut it out. But that was it - they didn't refine it after that and went about their merry way.
I have to believe that the accuracy of a foundation is more important but I think it's a fool's dream. They get "close" and they're checked out before the "next guy" has to fix it.
Maybe I am just bad at it but I can't get anything done DIY to fit properly. It's always off by like 1-2mm which means holes don't align, there's a gap in the baseboard, etc. I have to throw the entire part away and then pay someone to do it properly.
Unless a 3d printer or CNC machine is responsible for the accuracy you better count me out.
Ah, I did pay someone to do the millwork and trim work. You need a very accurate miter saw and a lot of experience to make perfect niters. I’m getting there but I still get off by a 1/16tb” to a 1/32nd” often.
The finish work is the final last guy. The guy that did our trim would randomly yell out swear words every 20 minutes. His life is hard. And he was expensive.
A couple of jobs a contractor I used for a long time (before he, sadly, retired) involved some drywall. He got drywall specialists to do it. He said they were far faster and cheaper than him doing it himself.
I do have a guest bedroom in my house where I once had some time during a holiday shutdown when my job situation was a bit perilous. I had some crumbling plaster so I put some drywall up. It's... functional.
Painting is one thing I do myself. I do it enough I got reasonably good at it and--for touchup--I can reasonably take shortcuts that someone I was paying couldn't.
I find that most contractors are incentivized to maximize throughput and thus do a just-good-enough job so that the average person doesn't notice. Once you learn some common skills like electrical, drywall, tile, etc, you will never stop finding defects in everyone's homes.
I've saved myself hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years by doing my own work, but now I can only see defects everywhere because that's what I've trained myself to look for.
That’s definitely a killer. Staying at an Airbnb right now where all I can see is poor workmanship.
There are a million jobs I still need to get to, but at least I know that once they’re done I’ll be happy with the result. Having only just started down the home diy route, there’s a load to learn and I still make a lot of mistakes, but I’m improving, and it’s satisfying to know that next time I’ll get it right, faster and cheaper than before.
For renovations I try to do as much work as possible, eg tile removal/replacement, backer board removal/replacement....let the plumber come in to a clean and prepped worksite for a valve sweat....he’s in and out ASAP, I’ve saved budget from just throwing money at a GP contractor to do everything, and I get to do the non-expert stuff myself.
But I think that the schmo vs pro divide is real when you get to electrical, plumbing etc. HE’S the pro, and I’m the Schmo. As my favorite interviewer says.
>But I think that the schmo vs pro divide is real when you get to electrical, plumbing etc. HE’S the pro, and I’m the Schmo.
IMHO, this is backwards. Electrical work is twisting wires and screwing them down. Plumbing is gluing or clamping stuff together (unless you're sweating copper). The actual mechanics of doing it takes little skill and pros aren't going to be that much better/faster than you. The real difference is the amount of knowledge the pro has of codes and how things need to be. However, the concepts for residential are pretty straight forward though and relatively easy to learn. You can pick them up starting with simple stuff.
Compare that to something like drywall. Your drywall finish work is going to suck compared to a pro and they're going to do it way faster than you could.
When I hired a plumber the things he did were basically impossible for me. He didn't sweat copper. The first thing he did was heat up the old pipe so that he could screw it out and replace it and by old pipe I mean the plumbing inside the wall, the pipe you'd screw your angle valve onto. I'm not going to play around with fire and screw things up for good. This was actually a freebie and wasn't strictly necessary. Second he connected the toilet which was moved by around 15cm to the right and he used crimped copper, selected parts out of a box with every possible piece you could need and it aligned perfectly. If I had to do that then it would take me multiple attempts and thrown out parts involving multiple trips to the store. I'd also be stuck with tools I'd never need again. Instead the plumber finished the work in around an hour.
I agree with you, but for me it’s a risk and liability thing. It’s also a function of what I have had the experience doing...I can actually hang/tape/mud drywall semi decently, DEFINITELY not as fast or as good as a pro. Same with tiling, flooring etc , most cosmetic things. But I’ve never had the opportunity to learn much about plumbing or electrical. And those could have huge consequences if not done properly.
I agree with you but drywall and other finish stuff is low stakes. Anything that could cause damage to the house or <clutches pearls> hurt somebody is high stakes by comparison. Or at least that's how a lot of people think about it.
That said I'm a cheapskate and do my own finish work even though I hate making things look nice.
There are lots of pros out there who don't know what they are doing. That is true in all fields. Still, I'm certain that there is someone for hire that can outperform an amateur. Even if the final product is good in either case, there are other considerations like time investment (hours and calendar), and opportunity costs.
> There are lots of pros out there who don't know what they are doing.
Often these pros are also the ones that are easiest to find because the ones that know what they are doing are in high enough demand that they go mainly off word of mouth and friend-of-a-friend type business.
We bought a house three years ago that was built in 2006. The number of things I've found that were done just blatantly wrong has soured my opinion of general contract labor quite considerably.
I hired someone to fix some water damage by a door about three months after we moved in. The next spring when it rained we had a literal waterfall coming in from the top of the door frame.
Never again.
I've since torn that entire wall down to the studs, cleaned everything up, put it back together correctly, and rebuilt the attached deck.
I don't know how much that would have cost to get fixed by a professional (supposing I could have found one that actually knew what they were doing), but I'm guessing it was easily $10-$20k of work if labor was factored in.
>Still, I'm certain that there is someone for hire that can outperform an amateur.
Differentiating and correctly selecting the true pro out of a lineup of estimates is a skill in and of itself. For most construction tasks, I'm better at the task itself than I am at finding someone who can do it better than I can.
I'd like to see you draw. The capital investment is almost zero. You just need a pencil and some paper. You can get both for $2. Meanwhile you can just go on fiver and hire someone to draw something for you for around $30 (number pulled out of thin air) at a level of quality that would take you hundreds of hours of training.
High skill labor usually involves lots of expensive one time costs. I don't see how there is an opportunity to save money.
