Comment by tstrimple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tstrimple | Hacker News Reader

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This is why I DIY pretty much everything which doesn't require me to climb onto our roof. It often takes me longer overall, because of general lack of energy after work combined with kids activities all throughout the week and kids competitions on weekends. But once I get started, I find the process goes quite quickly and that often includes YouTube research time and finding videos that solve my exact problem with the exact model of appliance I'm working on. Even building my own cabinets and epoxying my garage floor was all quite easy and has led to higher quality results than I've seen in the past from contractors that we've hired as well as work done for friends and neighbors. Hopefully this weekend I'll be pouring a concrete countertop for my daughter's bathroom so we can get that room wrapped up.

It's just time consuming and life has a lot of demands. I'd happily pay for this work if I had any trust in the results. But good contractors are hard to find and already very busy.

> I'd happily pay for this work if I had any trust in the results.

This is exactly how I feel.

What's even worse is that when I hire contractors, I invariably have to clean up their mess and fix things myself so that they're up to my standards.

I've had a contractor do a job so poorly that it was more trouble to fix their mess than it would have been for me to do the thing myself from the start.

For the curious, this is the saga of when I had to fix my washing machine because a repair man used the wrong type of terminals when fixing it previously: https://andri.yngvason.is/repairing-the-washing-machine.html

Plus, contractors don't want to do your small, easily-DIY-able job. They want to do big, profitable projects. The contractors around where I live won't even get out of bed for less than $1,000. And, as others have mentioned, there's no craftsmanship anymore. They show up, do everything exactly to code as fast as they can, and leave. You're the one who has to live with the quality of work.

> They show up,

if you're lucky

> do everything exactly to code

if you're lucky

> as fast as they can

if you're lucky

Haha, yeah, you have to hound them on the phone to get them to show up and even then they're not going to show up on time or even at all.

Yup.

After multiple bad experiences with contractors [1], I decided I could fail all by myself, for free.

So I bought all the tools, all the books (now youtube videos), do some mockups (eg practice tiling in the garage) before each project, and still (mostly) hate the results.

But it's cheaper, I learn a helluva lot, and my third attempt is usually good enough.

[1] Just 4 weeks ago, after a storm, I finally figured out my very expensive backyard fence doesn't have footings. That contractor just stuffed the posts in the ground and filled in with dirt. Stupid me wouldn't have even thought to ask, much less verify that work. So now I'll be learning how to make a fence. So it goes...

> I'd happily pay for this work if I had any trust in the results. But good contractors are hard to find and already very busy.

Even the "good" contractors are unlikely to take as much care as you want them to for these sorts of things. Previous owners had a bathroom fitted, and did a really good job except for the tiles behind the toilet where they clearly didn't bother spending 45 seconds installing tile spacers between like 4 tiles.The rest of the job is flawless, but it annoys me every time I see it.

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