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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

I knew a real estate agent who specialized in cabins and mountain properties.

He had a constant inventory of what he called "Divorce Cabins". They were half-finished DIY cabin builds or renovations that turned out to be way more stress and work than the couples expected. This tended to lead to divorce, which lead to a forced sale of the property.

Experienced contractors would pick them up at a discount, finish the work with their crews, and sell them off.

These things are doable if you have infinite time and money to spend on renting the right equipment and hiring help for jobs that require experience and/or multiple people. However, it's virtually impossible for someone to do on weekends alone.

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And yet there are people who have built cabins in Alaska with nothing but some metal and a lot of ingenuity and muscle.

I think that if you have to build a cabin that conforms to certain building guidelines, bank standards, codes, mainstream retail expectations.... then for sure you are going to encounter expenses and risk.

But I really hate this notion of "just pay someone to do it correctly", because this proposition also has a ton of risk and expense associated with it as well. Not every contractor who takes a job is Bob the Builder.

For me, if I was serious about building a home for myself so that it's customized to my taste and an extremely good value, I would throw all of the rules out of the window and build it exactly like the real cabins out there in Alaska and Siberia whose style has been perfected over hundreds of years.

>But I really hate this notion of "just pay someone to do it correctly", because this proposition also has a ton of risk and expense associated with it as well.

For almost any task you'd consider hiring a professional, there is less risk and less cost, which is why professional exist. They are the best option for a wide range of cost/risk tradeoffs.

>Not every contractor who takes a job is Bob the Builder

But the majority are a lot better than the average person thinking they can build. Experience is a useful thing, in software dev and in building.

I'm on the fence. With youtube, you can find so many things tricks and suggestions, things that professionals don't even know.

With my current home, I've brought in contractors half a dozen times. Half of those were terrible, terrible experiences. The other half saved me vast amounts of time. However, even with the solid contractors, for them it is a balance of time and money leading to some cut corners that, as the home owner, I would never cut on. But time, time is the thing I don't have enough of, else I would figure out most things.

Totally agree with this, I replied similarly to the same OP. If a job is extremely complex and dangerous, but I have all the time in the world, I will find an extremely time-inefficient but safe way of doing it.

Contractors usually will cut a corner to save money and time, for example they may not tighten everything back up as well as it should be when operating on a furnace, only for you to encounter the smoke/leak next year when the machine vibration finally kicks those bolts loose.

>time is the thing I don't have enough of, else I would figure out most things.

Sure, if your time has no value, then you can learn to be professional at everything. And for many tasks the amount you'd have to pay to learn to do it far exceeds the cost of hiring someone, since they amortize their training time and tool cost over multiple clients.

Since time is finite, that's why it often pays in both time and money to hire someone.

> With youtube, you can...

Youtube and the like have led a significant number of people to assume they have skills they don't, and the effect is large enough there's subfields in econ and psych that study this effect. For example [1]

[1] https://review.chicagobooth.edu/behavioral-science/2018/arti...

As a softeare dev who used to work in the contracting space, I cannot tell you how many stories I have of licensed, insured, regulated tradesmen going to jobsites and the outcome being burned down houses, flooded houses, oil spills, trees falling onto houses, and just monetary and physical damages galore.

If you have the time and desire to do things carefully, truly, then you will do things carefully. You'll find that tradesmen have plenty of expertise and money-- the only thing they don't have is time, and it really shows.

>I cannot tell you how many stories

This is not the metric. It's a self selected post hoc measurement, subject to mental bias.

The proper way is to measure all pros that do a task, then the ratio that did badly, then do the same thing for amateurs, and do so carefully (preferably somehow double blind) to remove cognitive bias. Then compare ratios.

When such things are done, I find almost every time notice my (and likely your) anecdotal claims vanish. I suspect this is such a case.

A good example is a friend owns a business that handles two cases of building things: doing it themselves first time, and fixing screwups done by amateurs. Literally (I've seen the books because I was surprised when he told me this) 75% of their revenue is repairing things people screwed up by not hiring pros, and then it costs much more. (It's related to wetland construction issues).

Then don't construct in a wetland? 90% of building involves avoiding risk, not developing Herculean skills to overcome risks.

It would be like if I lived in Thailand and then complained that I got electrocuted trying to set up a really complicated AC system. If you aren't willing to put in the time to do that kind of electrical work safely, then ask yourself why you really want to live in an area where that type of work is a pressing requirement.

I don't subscribe to your philosophy that all contractors are superheroes that are immune to messing things up. I'm not paying $125 an hour for a guy who lives in a tin shack to come and tell me how much of a pro he is just to disappear the moment I discover some deficiency in his work.

>Then don't construct in a wetland?

Failure through believing your skills are above what they are is not unique to wetland.

>I don't subscribe to your philosophy that all contractors are superheroes

I've never stated anything close to that. Since you've moved on to strawmen, there's no sense discussing further, since you apparently left this discussion some time back.

What it comes down to in my way of thinking about it is that for me, it's easier to do the research around finding a great, on-the-level contractor than it is to do the research around doing it DIY.

> And yet there are people who have built cabins in Alaska with nothing but some metal and a lot of ingenuity and muscle.

You're forgetting time. Not sure if you've seen "Dick Proenneke in Alone in the Wilderness" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG3fUIoXQ5A).

It's a great watch, and a good example of what I think you're referring to overall...that said it looked like an extremely hard way to build and from personal experience helping my sister build their holiday home, also not an approach I would recommend to anyone that doesn't have a very strong conviction and/or passion to see a self build through.

I was going to post this, glad I scrolled down. My kids love watching that too.

Absolutely. In Alaska time is a resource that widely available but other resources are harder to find. I wonder how far is the next hardware store.

Another great series is Advoko: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRSUxRUZb0I

It's extremely hard. Proenneke was a talented craftsman who had spent his whole life working as a mechanic and carpenter. He wasn't an office-bound DIY enthusiast.

I can clearly see both sides by now. I've built a high sleeper in my old apartment from scratch (which is kind of an understatement as it was effectively half a floor on top of a whole room including real stairs as a concession to my then-pregnant wife).

After 3 months of advance planning, I finally realized the gravity of my mistake when the delivery truck lifted half a ton of wood onto the sidewalk and drove away. For me, it was just enough of a project to seriously endanger our relationship and get me to my mental and physical limits, but hell, it turned out great.

There's really something to physical work and woodworking in particular that is haptic and makes you proud inside which you don't get at all in software engineering.

Would I do it again? Absolutely not, that was nuts. But I'm still glad I did and I enjoy doing some woodworking from time to time (like that bottle rocket launch pad for my daughter lately).

In the end I'm also pretty glad I'm in a job without breaking my back before I'm 60.

The software is only in our heads. It's mind blowing, but you can't see and feel it. I also love to build physical stuff - last month I built a bed into my car, now I can go anywhere and sleep there - what an awesome thing it is, and my girlfriend loves it too. She appreciates software as well (being a genetic biologist/data analyst/programmer), but the bed, a comparably simpler thing, is what we talk all the time about. The second thing - when was the last time you built a piece of software that helps you do fun stuff? I didn't do that for years, maybe never - all software I build is for "serious work stuff". To be honest, I don't know what program could I make that would bring me joy comparable to the car-bed.

Probably the thing you crave is the intersection of robotics and software, or at least firmware for devices that transform objects in the real world.

For example, there probably is some work that the software world can do to transform how humans currently go about cooking food. A wifi crock pot is a step in the right direction, but what about a wifi controlled airfryer, or a system of machines that is coordinated to do food processing in more human-ways?

Hardware and software alone by themselves are unable to solve this problem without working together: a knife and a pneumatic arm can't achieve anything without human/AI/preprogrammed input, and a human cannot possibly take themselves out of the cooking equation without some physical device, i.e with just an app and a database.

This is exactly why I decided against purchasing a cottage (thats what we call it up here in Canada).

I realized I would be spending at least 4 hours in traffic every weekend to double my house work.

Instead why not just put all that time in making my home in the city as habitable as possible?

Maybe some day but it would have to be a permanent and only residence.

Fun little side-note but Cabins are called cabins in Western (BC & Alberta for sure, and I believe Sask as well) Canada. It's only Eastern Canada that calls them cottages.

They're commonly called camps in Northern Ontario.

If he is still in the business, he is probably making a killing right now as people are swarming like rats off a ship to rural areas.

I have my condo in a mountain town with fiber. HOA dues and tourists are issues; I'd love property I was willing to invest in and reasonably accessible time-wise but Nevada is expensive when it comes to real trees and I'm done investing in CA. Been here awhile before the exodus.

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