Why Should You Do Your Own Renos?
I will always remember that first day waking up in the new house. I had to put on my shoes to leave the bedroom. We had spent the entire weekend moving and the floors were dirty, the wide open space that I thought we had moved into was suddenly a maze of furniture and boxes.
In the kitchen, the clay floor tile was crumbling into a large sinkhole, and the cupboard beneath the sink had more mouse poop than I ever wish to see again. I’m talking impressive amounts of it. Those little guys were clearly ruling the roost for the last few decades (I will spare you the photos).
That morning as I navigated the task of making toast in a messy kitchen, I tried to wrap my head around the staggering list of things that needed to be done in the house. Going into the move, I knew that those first months of renos were going to be the most difficult. I can say with certainty that I’ve never lived somewhere as inhospitable as our house during those first six months. So why do we choose to take on projects like this?
Lack of Options
One of the reasons we might decide to buy a fixer-upper and take on the renos ourselves is that we don’t have much of a choice. In the current housing market with sky high property costs and interest rates, it is becoming much more difficult for prospective buyers to find a place on the property ladder, let alone buy something that is move-in ready.
Mal and I were lucky to have gotten into the market when we did, first purchasing a small house in the suburbs, selling after a few years and moving back to the city. Without this timing and the stroke of luck we had buying before prices spiked again, it would have made it much harder to afford to be home owners in the city that we love.
But buying the house that we did carried the embedded cost of its required renovations. The house was over a hundred years old, and while we could tell it had been a much loved family home, it had not been invested in for several decades. The attic windows and skylights were leaking, it needed roof repairs, it had knob and tube wiring and was extremely cold and difficult to heat in the winter.
To go through a contractor for these repairs was not a viable option for us financially. In Ontario (and I’m sure many other areas) the cost of hiring skilled trades and contractors has gone up substantially with a shortage of workers, less people entering into the trades, and an increase in raw material and manufacturing costs. As a result of this raise in contractor costs, deciding to do your own home improvements is not always a choice, but more so a reality that comes with the act of buying a home at the top of your price range.
A Sense of Satisfaction
However, not everything comes down to money, and there are ways to fund home renovations such as home improvement loans and mortgage refinancing. There are other, more intrinsic rationale for taking on home reno challenges, such as the desire to accomplish something worthwhile.
Maybe we suspect that we have the skills to be handy or thrifty and want to try it out just to test our limits and see if we can. Like adrenaline junkies seeking their next thrill, we long for the sense of achievement when we reach the summit and can look back on all we have accomplished.
It is the same reason we enjoy watching Instagram reels of things being refurbished or aesthetically improved; it is inherently satisfying. We get a hit of dopamine when we compare the before and after product and feel satisfied with the result. Maybe it makes us want to try out something similar and get to experience that feeling first hand by doing it ourselves.
Exercising our Creativity/ Individuality
Of course, the reason we take on these projects might also be because we just enjoy the creative process and working with our hands. If we already enjoy creative projects, this translates well into home renovation because at the heart of it, renos are just fine art projects done on a larger scale.
When we do our own home improvements, we can become masters of our own domain, getting to be involved in every aspect of customizing our surroundings, updating it with our individual preferences, making our home entirely our own.
Managing our own projects also means that we can essentially design as we go. We can make decisions on the spot, and changes on a whim. When I was working on the front bedroom and adding insulation and vapor barrier to the two exterior walls, I made the quick decision to take advantage of the open walls to add extra power outlets and sconces with switches on either side of where the bed would go. When I was placing the octagon boxes for the light fixtures, I was able to go online and source the sconces I would be ordering so I could quickly determine the height to hang the boxes. It is the freedom to make these on the fly decisions that I consider to be such a valuable part of DIY renovating.
Expanding our knowledge
It can be a powerful feeling to look around a house and realize you have seen into the walls of every room, refinished every surface, and that you know a building, quite literally, inside and out.
It is impossible to predict all the issues that will arise when we take on a project, so the act of renovating becomes one giant crash course filled with thousands of mini lessons. Many of us learn best by doing and as we learn these skills and repeat them room after room, we solidify our skills and add them to our arsenal of what we can do. So when things in our home inevitably wear out, we can rest easy knowing that we fixed it once, so we can fix it again.
Overtime, without even realizing it is happening, we become experts of our own home. Having now redone almost every surface of our house, and seeing into walls of every room, I can now map out the path of our HVAC system, plumbing and our electrical. This becomes very important when systems break down, or if ever we want to add on to what is existing.
When we first had an HVAC mechanic in to assess the imbalance in heating and cooling in the house, I got fleeced. The guy spent over an hour talking at me, recommending that I allow him to take out our fully-functional 4-year old forced air furnace and put in a boiler system that connected to over a dozen radiators. When I said I wasn’t interested in doing that, he still charged me $150 for the consultation, which I paid because I didn’t know any better at the time. Now I do. I know that consultations should almost always be free, and if they aren’t, they should state that up front or over the phone before the appointment is even set. It was a valuable learning experience.
Professionals don’t always do a good job
As I experienced early on during my consultation with the HVAC professional, sometimes hired help is not all that helpful. Unfortunately, I have several friends that have also experienced the shortcomings of professional contractors after moving into new houses that were hastily constructed and subsequently revealed serious problems. Moisture issues, cold drafts where walls should have been continuously insulated, and bad craftsmanship, these places all involved professional trades where the common denominator was a tendency to be less concerned about quality, and more focused on speed.
We tend to think that if we hire a ‘professional’, they will come in and automatically know how to do something. But when they come in, they are seeing our house for the first time, they often need to spend time figuring out how to do something just like we would. People we hire commonly favor quick fixes and are less interested in long term solutions. And sometimes they are just flat out wrong about things. While Mal and I have tried to do most things in this house on our own, there have been exceptions for things like the installation of a gas fireplace and an AC unit.
During the installation of the AC, the HVAC technician agreed to add a return duct from the basement up to the second floor. However, when I noticed what he was doing, I saw that he was installing return duct nearly six inches away from the wall, which would have left the duct jutting out into the middle of the basement stairway landing. When I asked him about it, he said it was because it had to be a certain distance away from an exterior wall to prevent the duct from getting too cold in winter and I had to remind him it was a semi-detached house; we have a neighbor living on the other side of that wall. It is an interior wall that doesn’t get cold.
While he tried to correct it, unfortunately, he had already cut the hole for the vent into our hardwood flooring on the landing above which I later had to painstakingly patch with scraps of old flooring.
So while you might not have the expertise to install an AC unit or run a refrigerant line, you can almost certainly install a new branch of ductwork and you would probably do it better than that guy who attempted it at our house.
As homeowners, we are guaranteed to care more about a job being completed properly compared to a stranger coming into our house for the first time. We are more likely to put in the time and effort to make sure a task is done well. And while you may not have trained in the trade that you are seeking, you might be willing to do the research and take some time to learn how to do a small aspect of it.
While there are times when we do require the assistance of professionals, there are so many facets of home improvement that can be carried out by the homeowner, and doing so furthers our knowledge of our home and the systems within it.
Takeaway
I am always of the opinion that if you think you might be able to do something yourself, you might as well go ahead and try, and if you don’t think you can do it yourself — just try anyway. If you really want to accomplish something, chances are you will find a way to get it done.
Today, there are ample resources available in the form of online guides and video tutorials that can help guide us when we get stuck. But to make the effort to try something ourselves has the potential to save us money and provide us with a great deal of satisfaction when we get to see the final product and reflect on what we learned in the process.
