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Comment by akvadrako | Hacker News Reader

I agree it isn't rocket science, but plastering if one of those things best left to professionals, much more so than plumbing or electrical for instance. They usually make near minimum wage, are just so much faster and produce a better result.

I've started plastering a few of my walls and after wasting a couple days doing a few square meters ended up hiring a couple guys to do the rest of the house. There is just no comparison in value.

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It just take practice, my first try was not perfect but acceptable, the second time was much better and the third on a larger wall with lots of defects looks good, but I probably spent too much time on it, although I am confident that I can now do it much faster.

Sure, but I don’t want to have two crappy looking walls in my house with a good looking third one.

Of course if I do something enough I can get good at it, the point of hiring someone is because I am not going to do it enough to get good at it.

Another argument to always hire someone else: if you learn to get a nice finish with drywall, you'll start noticing defects in existing drywall. Everywhere.

Highly recommend Vancouver Carpenter on youtube, if you do want to go down that rabbit hole.

That is my experience as well, second or third time I'm vastly improved (not as good or as fast as a pro still, but upgraded to 'acceptable') since I've learned from the largest mistakes. Too bad I have to live with those mistakes though since I did them to my house!

To me it's like painting. Yes, I can paint my walls. But hiring it out is substantially faster and you get people who do nothing but paint all day every day to knock it out.

I used to hang drywall when I was young and got pretty good at making a wall look completely smooth with no seams visible. But it's something that is so much more efficient to leave to the pros because they just do it so much faster than the DIY homeowner can, and it always looks better.

Here in Switzerland it's 10 CHF / square meter for white and 15-20 CHF / square meter for colour walls plus transport plus recycling plus material.

I wouldn't call this cheap :-)

Surely you could save some money by doing the painting yourself? Is it all or nothing there? In the States drywall and paint are two separate crews.

you could. most people rent (60+%) and they don't paint their walls.

I'm sorry, but it isn't that hard, really. Also, awkward to talk about how you pay someone a barely living wage as an excuse to not do it yourself.

If your time is billed out at a large multiple of x, it’s pretty relevant.

> Also, awkward to talk about how you pay someone a barely living wage as an excuse to not do it yourself.

Guess how much they make if you don’t pay them?

It’s better for everyone if someone who can make more money per hour uses that higher earning power to offload lower income tasks to people in those jobs.

Exactly. This is why it's immoral to cook your own food for dinner, for instance, instead of going to a restaurant or hiring a personal chef.

Nice sarcasm. My thought as well. Where do you draw the line?

It's really simple: if you want to do something yourself, do it. If you want to pay someone to do it for you, do that. There's many reasons you might choose one route or the other, and they're all valid. Ignore sanctimonious assholes who tell you that you should support workers just because.

Basic logic fail. I didn’t say it was immoral to do it yourself. I said it was good to support the worker (from both the worker and the payers’ perspectives), not bad.

The view I replied to implied it would be gross to pay someone to make your meal because it’s cheap.

It's not like those laborers would be made any better off if you did the work yourself.

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