We bought our 1950’s home in 2014 and paid off our mortgage in 8 years. We are debt free! We’ve been wanting to do a full renovation of our 1950’s house but set the goal of owning it first. Along the way we’ve done small projects to make our house a home including pulling up old carpets in the living room and hallway and refinishing the oak wood floors that had been painted white. We also remodeled our main bathroom. But now we are wanting to get to the kitchen and master bathroom which are both original to the home. I would like to DIY our kitchen cabinets but before we do that I created faux built-ins in the living room and am working on fully custom built-ins in the master bedroom to practice my drawer-making skills before going to the kitchen.
If you would like to follow along, I post on the blog different step by step tutorials and tips on my DIY Projects.
Types of Home Renovation Projects
If you are doing any type of home renovation project, there are essentially four types of workers to do home renovation projects when work needs to get done:
- Contractors (companies who hire out laborers)
- Skilled laborer to do individual jobs
- Skilled laborers to help you or coach you as you do it
- Do it yourself
If you are adding things to your house like built-ins or cabinets to the house, where you might need skilled craftsmen, you can also combine projects this way:
- Hire a contractor to do it all
- Hire skilled laborer to do individual jobs
- Hire skilled laborers to work with you or coach you as you do it
- Buy something off the shelf and install it
- Buy something off the shelf and build custom add-on’s
Why You Should Consider Do-It-Yourself
If you are interested in DIYing your own home but don’t think you can, you should reconsider. There are so many options available to you if you are willing to try and learn. And the cost of hiring a contractor these days is very expensive. It is much better to be your own contractor and hire out different jobs as needed. You can budget it out through different quotes and can often do a good portion of it fully custom or combine off the shelf with semi-custom. For my house, I’ve done a good mix of the above options. But I have not hired a contractor. Since we’ve been in this house, we have hired individual skilled laborers that sometimes did it for us. Other times they let me work with them when I knew some but wanted a hand to make sure I did it right. I did this with our main bathroom, working with a skilled laborer and handyman who let me do a lot of it but also coached me along the way.
How I Learned to do Handyman Projects
As a boy, I did not know the difference between a phillips and a flathead screwdriver. My mom signed me up for a house construction job with a man who taught teenagers how to work. I did this for several summers in high school, two days a week during the school year, and then did some during the college winter breaks or in between other summer jobs. It was hard at times, but it was a great experience.
One thing that doing this at a young age gave me was more confidence. I’m not trying to brag when I say this, but there have been times that friends of mine who ask for my help with moving furniture or doing a small job at their home are surprised at how hard I work and how much I know. I don’t think anything of it. I love DIY projects and when I am not in a rush, I think I am pretty good at it. I am definitely not a natural, but no one would know it. I work slowly and am a perfectionist. Most of the time, I notice the smallest details that others don’t. But I love to learn and I know how to work.
How You Can Do It Yourself
Having the basic foundation of home remodeling certainly helps when it comes to doing DIY home renovations. But, quite frankly, I don’t remember how to do every step of the renovation projects that we did. But, I simply am not in a hurry and I figure out the steps that I don’t remember how to do through either YouTube or when I am still not confident, I find a friend who can show me or coach me through something.
When I do DIY projects, I don’t want them to become bigger than they were supposed to be. I have enough experience to know what I need to get help with. And that is probably the biggest benefit of all when it comes to DIY home renovation projects. I don’t typically touch electrical or plumbing without being very confident I know what I am doing. And I often don’t unless it is very easy and everything is easily accessible. Sometimes doing a project can open up a bigger set of problems. And that’s what you have to be careful of. The goal is to learn and grow and be able to observe things and know your limitations so when you do projects you know what you are getting into or what it takes. This helps in two ways – if you find that when you look into a project, it might open up other projects that you are not prepared to tackle, you can get someone who knows what they’re doing to finish out the job. The second option is that when you hire someone else and you know what a job generally requires, you will know what a good rate is and what is not.
Taking this learning approach to home renovation is a great approach that can allow you to be apprenticed and learn skills that could benefit you in the long run. At a minimum, you will be able to customize your home and make it what you want without having to deal with the outlandish prices that contractors are charging. When you hire out skilled laborers, watch them and ask them questions. Good skilled laborers are typically very helpful and friendly. You will learn something when you stay alert, listen, and offer a helping hand. They will really appreciate you, as many of them are under-appreciated and quite frankly undervalued. Most don’t want to pay but they are also very unreasonable. If you pay them what they ask, are reasonable, and offer a helping hand or seem the least bit interested in what they do, in a friendly sort of way, I’ve found that I start friendships with my handymen. I truly enjoy them. Aside from that, they will appreciate you because you aren’t a headache of a customer and often they’ll give you more information to know how to do it yourself next time.