When we took on our upstairs renovation, it was with the understanding that it would take a while because we intended to DIY almost everything ourselves. However, sometimes it can pay to call in a professional, so I thought I’d take a minute to detail what we take into consideration when we decide to contract out work on our home rather than DIY.
- Does it require a lot of expertise and/or an inspection? If so, it’s a good bet that contracting the work out to a professional is a good idea. If you don’t know what you’re doing and it needs to be inspected, you may end up having to do it more than once or pay a professional to fix your mistakes anyway.
- If you screw it up, will it cost you more to fix than it would have cost you to call in a professional in the first place? If so, we’ll pretty much call a pro every time. For example, if you screw up plumbing work and end up with water damage, you’ll need someone to fix your plumbing, plus all of the damage from the water has to be repaired on top of that. That sounds like too much risk for us. That said, we don’t call in a pro plumber every time a pipe leaks or we have to install a sink faucet. Those are easy fixes. But when we decided to install a new bathroom from scratch on the second floor? Screwing that up could do some serious damage and we knew it was best left to a professional.
That’s really about it. The cost of a professional is worth it for us if an inspection is required in a field we’re not particularly familiar with and if screwing the job up means it will cost a LOT to fix. So based on these questions, we’ve contracted out:
- Our plumbing work if it’s more difficult that installing a new sink where there is existing plumbing.
- Any electrical work that’s harder than wiring a new fixture to an existing switch (which Seth can do but still confuses me).
- The installation of our tankless water heater. Seth says in retrospect he could have done this on his own, but since it required tampering with gas lines, we’d never seen a functioning one in real life before, and it required an inspection, we decided to play it safe.
And last, here are examples of things we won’t contract out:
- Insulation. This requires an inspection if you have a building permit pulled, at least where we are, but it’s so easy there’s no reason to call in a professional.
- Drywall. This one is annoying and time consuming, but it’s pretty hard to screw up if you have a few sets of hands to help you hang the panels and you pay close attention to getting a smooth finish when you mud and sand (repeatedly).
- Tiling. We contracted this out once before but after seeing it done and realizing how expensive the installation was, we’re confident we can take this job on ourselves. To be fair, we contracted a sloped concrete slab with a step that needed to be tiled, which was probably a little far out of our depth as tiling newbies, but now that we have flat surfaces to work with we’re excited to get our feet wet.
- Painting. This is like 90% elbow grease and 10% talent and/or prep (depending on how good you are at painting a straight line). Plus my dad is a pro (literally) and seems unable to resist coming over to help (aka taking over, which is fine with me!) so there’s no reason for me to call anybody in on a painting project.
When did you figure out you might be in over your head on a DIY project? Share with us!
There’s an outlet in your shower.
Also, doing insulation properly is not very easy. There is a lot of information on buildingscience.com about it. The air sealing part is the important part and is most often the piece that is neglected. Bungalow style homes are also one of the most difficult types of homes to insulate properly. DIY tends to lead to a lot of work with poor results and sometimes worse like mold growth or fire hazards. Generally spray foam is required for bungalows. You can DIY it but it’s risky in a lot of ways. The best way to conserve energy is to make your furnace and air conditioner run less. The way to do that is to insulate properly. A home energy audit is a smart and inexpensive place to start.
I’ve really been enjoying your blog so far!
There IS an outlet in our shower. Good eye! It’s disconnected but I thought the picture was too funny not to share!
And thanks for the resources! We did have to do some sealing in our house. We had a mysterious fly problem for years that ended up being due to a huge gap between the walls and the roof that was visible when we took out the paneling and insulation. We sealed that up and the flies suddenly disappeared. We also had to replace some insulation that was suspicious as far as mold goes, but that was only near the chimney where our roof had leaked a few years ago. The rest of the insulation was in very good shape considering the upstairs of our house was added sometime in the 1960s, so we opted to keep it instead of replacing all of it. If we were planning on staying in this house long term, we probably would have sprung for spray foam, but since we’re planning to be out within five years, it didn’t make sense for us to take on that added renovation cost.
We are also lucky to have some friends inside the city inspection department who had some very helpful tips for us along the way, and who made sure each step of our renovation has been done correctly. If not for them, I think we would definitely have hit more snags down the line.
Also, our bungalow is totally not insulated as well as we would like, but given the other issues we have with the upstairs addition (it was also poorly wired, which we fixed, and is poorly configured as far as the A/C is concerned, which we decided to pass on fixing in favor of our window unit), we definitely had to pick our battles financially.
I’m glad you’re enjoying the blog and keep the construction tips coming! I’m sure we aren’t the only ones who could benefit from any good resources you point out!
-Kayla