Very true with wood unfortunately.
And then there's just the efficiency of having a little workshop where you fix stuff in a jiffy and hardly notice the amount of things that get their lifespan doubled. Good for your bank account as well the environment.
Oh, and seeing your children grow up with the idea that their parents just make/fix stuff, and that repairing things is the natural way to go about life. My three year old son regularly takes his portable toy kitchen, his toy tools, and starts 'repairing' it. That's priceless.
If I owned an old cottage or something like that, I would be quite comfortable doing DIY work on it. It's a little bit like doing DIY auto repairs on a brand-new Acura TSX vs. a 2002 Honda Civic. The stakes are different.
I think its quite the opposite. If you owned an old cottage with exposed hardwood trim, stained glass window, exposed hardwood stairs with a carpet runner, and custom built-ins it would be much harder to DIY improvements. That type of older house may also have older plumbing, older electrical, and possibly plaster walls, all of which will require more care and knowledge to DIY things than new electrical, plumbing or drywall.
Take for instance fixing a piece of trim that is an exposed hardwood vs. fixing a piece of trim that could be PVC/composite and some-shade-of-white. You can caulk over mistakes with white trim vs. trying to do a miter on exposed hardwood trim with not-square walls.
"The only difference between me and the guy who goes to Home Depot and does it himself is that I get it right the first time. This isn't rocket science."
His entire value proposition is that he can do something at high quality and get it done quickly. Yours is that you can do something high quality because we assume that you can take multiple attempts until you get it right.
If you are making something like cabinet doors that are mostly labor and not much wood, you can easily make them for one fifth the cost of what you’d pay from ikea… but tons of labor!
Aside from the pleasure of just doing something on your own, what you will probably have is something unique. People making electronic projects will probably adding features not available retail, or clothing in patterns and stitch design their own, etc.
Lots of way to value something other than $
You can definitely pick up used solid wood furniture for cheaper than building it yourself (especially if you consider the opportunity cost of your time), but you might not get exactly what you want.
There is some arbitrage as certain species of wood are cheaper if you are closer to where they come from (for example Douglas fir is cheaper on the west coast vs pine on the east coast), and for a small item it can be built where the wood is cheapest and shipped from there.
However, I think it’s not likely to make that large of a difference. Wholesale lumber prices aren’t that far off from what a hobbyist pays if you go to the same places.
I built my workbench out of $5 of scrap wood by buying a homemade platform that had been used for judging volleyball games, because no one else wanted a volleyball judging platform and I was willing to break it apart and cart away a couple hundred pounds of lumber.
I recently purchased a good quantity of rough cut maple, locust and oak for around 10-25 cents a board foot from another auction because the owner of the woodshop in question was retiring and everything must go.
When I build furniture there is no MDF or masonite anywhere in the build, no veneer, no staples (or pin nails) ... usually no fasteners at all.
And as had been pointed out in this thread — it is the exact height, width, depth that I want, with the features I want and the wood and finish that I want.
Started out building MAME cabinets, BTW, ha ha.
"Why would you do something to augment your experience of reality if it's inefficient?"
Hey, that's why I'm on the internet. I could hardly talk about woodworking to actual carpenters in real life, could I?
Pre-pandemic, I built my own cabinets in my garage with cabinet-grade plywood and Ikea butcherblock counters. I over-bought the wood by about 50% (because of a stupid mistake) and bought a really expensive track saw, and I still saved like 25-50% compared to buying the cabinets pre-made with the features I wanted. Even cheap cabinets would still have been slightly more expensive than DIY.
Granted, my cabinets are not perfect and I wouldn't put them in someone's kitchen, but they are more than good enough for what I need them for and both me and the wife are happy with them.
For some people, this comes with a condition: "as long as it's terrible" ;)
Also if you don't want the expense, there's plenty of small things you can make with a handful of tools. Whittling and carving is quite cheap and very satisfying.
If you are just starting out, I'd recommend starting with just the core tools [1] and a block plane.
[1] https://www.lie-nielsen.com/nodes/4219/home-education-gettin...
Alternatively you can take them to a kiln to get dried and the price still ends up being far below what you would pay per board foot for S2S lumber.
But, that much lumber is worth a lot of money. I think most domestic hardwoods are currently in the $5-$10 range per board foot (e.g. 12"x1"x1"). And that's rough sawn, you still need to mill that into usable pieces.