As you may have guessed I rather enjoy working on my home and running out the hardware store every weekend to tackle new and different projects around my house. I like having a sense of accomplishment at the end of a long weekend and I like making my 50 year old house a little more livable. But lately I’ve been hitting some roadblocks when it comes to my home improvement projects and it’s put me in a philosophical mood.
I’ve been thinking about my limitations and what I can and, more specifically, can’t always do around my house. My home improvement limitations roughly fall into the same categories as the somewhat infamous Project Triangle.
The old joke is, “You can have it done right, on time and within budget. Pick two.”
When it comes to any project, not just home improvement projects, there are essentially three characteristics or “limitations” that must be weighed and measured. So when you decide that something needs to be done around the house or you need to complete some sort of project at work, there are three factors you must consider. These three factors will determine if you decide to do complete your home improvement project yourself, hiring a contractor to do the work, or put the project off completely.
Money – When people thing of limitations, this is often what they think of first. Obviously, a lot of home improvement projects are expensive undertakings and can cause a significant drain on the wallet. A lot of my do-it-yourself home skills come from not having the money to hire someone else and yet still wanted to fix something up in my own home. Almost any home project is going to cost some money in materials, but the real expenses usually mount up when you begin paying someone else to do the work for you. This makes sense, because when you pay someone else you’re essentially trading your money for their…
Time – Some home improvement projects only take a few minutes, but some can take days, months or even years. If you’re got a lot of time on your hands then you can often save yourself a lot of money when it comes to home improvement projects. My basement remodeling job has been one of those long projects which has just gone on and on. Each month I put a little bit of money into materials and then I would spend my weekends and evenings using up those materials. So I’ve been buying and putting up drywall, insulating the basement and painting the walls with a TurboRoll paint roller when I have a time available. Of course, I was able to do all those things in my basement because because I’m not afraid to learn new things and improve my home improvement…
Knowledge – This is the limitation that I think keeps most people from venturing into a home improvement store and trying new things. A lot of people are afraid they’re going to “screw up” and the quality of the project will be compromised. There are lots of home improvement projects that take specialized skills and knowledge that’s not easily gained unless you, quite literally, get your hands dirty. Obviously, when you hire a contractor to do work on your home you’re paying for his or her time as well as his or her skill and knowledge. And the more time you have for a project, the more you can increase your own knowledge and the shorter the job may take overall.
All three of these limitations came into play for me when it came to finishing the floors in my basement. I had to get the floors of my basement done in a hurry, so I took some of the money I had saved from doing everything else in the basement on my own and hired a company to come in and put in laminate flooring in my basement with carpeting on my stairs. To save some money I decided to take up all the old carpeting myself and I agreed to put in the baseboards around the laminate flooring on my own. The money I’m spending for a contractor to do the work is more than I would have paid for materials alone, but they have the skill and the experience to put the floors down in a single day. I could probably do it myself, but it might takes me days, if not weeks, to really get into the rhythm of things and learn enough to do a good job.
And if you’re going to have someone come into your home and do any kind of work, make sure you follow some of this basic advice for how to hire a home contractor
Essentially, I saved money by using my knowledge and time for most of the basement and now I have some extra cash which I have decided to spend in order to buy the time and knowledge of a skilled contractor!
