TFW you're a fake man soyboy with a bed :(
We quit our jobs to build a cabin
321–330 of 402 posts
Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But I really hate this notion of "just pay someone to do it correctly", because this proposition also has a ton of risk and expense associated with it as well. For almost any task you'd consider hiring a professional, there is less risk and less cost, which is why professional exist. They are the best option for a wide range of cost/risk tradeoffs. >Not every contractor who takes a job is Bob the Builder But the maj…
I'm on the fence. With youtube, you can find so many things tricks and suggestions, things that professionals don't even know. With my current home, I've brought in contractors half a dozen times. Half of those were terrible, terrible experiences. The other half saved me vast amounts of time. However, even with the solid contractors, for them it is a balance of time and money leading to some cut corners that, as the…
>time is the thing I don't have enough of, else I would figure out most things.
Sure, if your time has no value, then you can learn to be professional at everything. And for many tasks the amount you'd have to pay to learn to do it far exceeds the cost of hiring someone, since they amortize their training time and tool cost over multiple clients.
Since time is finite, that's why it often pays in both time and money to hire someone.
> With youtube, you can...
Youtube and the like have led a significant number of people to assume they have skills they don't, and the effect is large enough there's subfields in econ and psych that study this effect. For example [1]
[1] https://review.chicagobooth.edu/behavioral-science/2018/arti...
Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really sure why you are being downvoted. My own experience aligns with what you are describing. For most residential work a homeowner can do a solid job as long as you are handy and willing to spend a little time familiarizing yourself with building codes and the appropriate techniques. Being a professional means being able to estimate accurately, meet those estimates, manage multiple jobs, etc. If timeline isn't…
And yet there is me, having to go to Home Depot 3 times for a simple job, and still managing to mess it up.
not sure if you've ever watched a crew work but one of the reasons for the cheap labor junior guy is to run to home depot.
Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find the opposite. If you want something done right you have to do it yourself. I try to only pay for labor when it's low/medium skill labor paired with a capital investment I don't want to make (e.g. getting new tires on my car and an alignment) or when I'm paying for a member of a professional club for their reputation and club membership (e.g. a lawyer or realtor)
I find that most contractors are incentivized to maximize throughput and thus do a just-good-enough job so that the average person doesn't notice. Once you learn some common skills like electrical, drywall, tile, etc, you will never stop finding defects in everyone's homes. I've saved myself hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years by doing my own work, but now I can only see defects everywhere because that's…
Including in your own work I'm sure.
Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
>But I really hate this notion of "just pay someone to do it correctly", because this proposition also has a ton of risk and expense associated with it as well. For almost any task you'd consider hiring a professional, there is less risk and less cost, which is why professional exist. They are the best option for a wide range of cost/risk tradeoffs. >Not every contractor who takes a job is Bob the Builder But the maj…
As a softeare dev who used to work in the contracting space, I cannot tell you how many stories I have of licensed, insured, regulated tradesmen going to jobsites and the outcome being burned down houses, flooded houses, oil spills, trees falling onto houses, and just monetary and physical damages galore. If you have the time and desire to do things carefully, truly, then you will do things carefully. You'll find tha…
>I cannot tell you how many stories
This is not the metric. It's a self selected post hoc measurement, subject to mental bias.
The proper way is to measure all pros that do a task, then the ratio that did badly, then do the same thing for amateurs, and do so carefully (preferably somehow double blind) to remove cognitive bias. Then compare ratios.
When such things are done, I find almost every time notice my (and likely your) anecdotal claims vanish. I suspect this is such a case.
A good example is a friend owns a business that handles two cases of building things: doing it themselves first time, and fixing screwups done by amateurs. Literally (I've seen the books because I was surprised when he told me this) 75% of their revenue is repairing things people screwed up by not hiring pros, and then it costs much more. (It's related to wetland construction issues).
Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, it is being off-grid. No $300 bi-monthly water/sewer bills (that's base charge w/o using any water). $7k - 10k in property taxes yearly. Huge heating and cooling costs for large living spaces. I do not especially like tiny houses on wheels, but I think I could live comfortably in an 800sf small house on a rural piece of land.
I can you that the amortized cost of a septic system could easily work out to $300 bi-monthly over a decade or two. Managing your own sewer is not trivial or inexpensive. For me, the tank plus installation was almost $10k CAD, and then the septic field itself would probably run between $30k and $50k CAD. So to be generous we could say $50k total for the full install. So that's about 8 years at $300 bimonthly just to…
Lots of tiny house owners don’t have septic, I’ve seen use composting toilets as a common option as well as incinerating toilets. Definitely more work, but way more appealing then storing tons of waste in an underground tank.
Not sure how they fare long term, but the septic isn’t the only option if you don’t have sewer available.
Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
I carefully curate my youtube viewing by using lots of incognito windows to view things I don't want showing up in my recommendations. All it takes is one errant click to throw the whole thing off. Oh why did I not incognito that terrible comedian?
You can remove videos from your watch history: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725?co=GENIE.Pla... I presume this also removes them as a factor in your recommendations.
> I presume this also removes them as a factor in your recommendations.
You presume too much!
/humor
That is helpful to know. I too have run into the errant click problem in YouTube. Drives me nuts.
Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem I have with "professionals" in Seattle area is that you pay a lot, and then you have to either have them come back every day to fix all the little things, or just give up and fix them yourself. It is emotionally draining that it's so costly and yet still done in a half-assed way. I may have been unlucky with the contractors, but on the other hand, it's not in their incentive to spend more time on somethin…
A good, reliable, trustworthy general contractor is is a true treasure. They'll either be able to do it themselves, or refer you to someone they trust, and trust is the most important part of this.
The corollary: When you find a good contractor, pay them well.
Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin
#329> The first thing he did was host a long-weekend work party to fix it up. I flew up from my home in Oakland, California. With a group of friends, we tore out exposed nails, cladded interior walls, built a deck and an outhouse, and hung shingles. At night, covered in sawdust and grime, we drank too much and huddled around a propane stove to keep warm, eventually falling asleep and breathing in noxious fumes all night…
Ultra running is definitely Type II fun. It’s not that enjoyable at the time but somehow in that suffering you find pleasure afterwards
The worse it feels, the better if feels when you stop.
Re: We quit our jobs to build a cabin
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It was a junk show and I quickly learned that the best approach was to continue writing software and pay pros to do the job. I feel personally attacked. Really though, I wonder how many things are on my 'Someday Maybe' list, that really I should just make more money to accomplish and/or find a youtube subscription that satisfies the urge to tinker on a particular topic.
If you have the opportunity (and can find contractors willing to work with you), picking out parts of a project to DIY is a good way to build skills, and save $$s. We're building a shop. I've contracted most of the build out, but found that I could save $20,000+ by DIY'ing the radiant heat portion myself. Took about a days worth of planning and research, another to lay down the pipe before the floor was poured, and a…
I recently installed a 6.8 kW system on my house. The final cost was $1.60/watt for "premium" Panasonic panels and Enphase microinverters, which was significantly lower than all the quotes I got. Tesla is now competitive watt for watt, but they achieve their prices with string inverters and/or panels from manufacturers that may not be around for the duration of their warranties.
Another benefit of going solo on my solar project was learning that I could legally install panels on a part of my roof that everyone else thought I couldn't use because of old setback rules. I was able to fit eight additional panels on my roof after discussing the issue with the city inspector.
Most of my prep time was spent writing my permit application. If you want to use mine as a reference or template, file an issue on my github repo for the project [1] and I'll upload it later. I'd also be happy to chat about the gear I chose, where I bought it, and share a list of materials.
[1] https://github.com/hamikm/solar-report (side note: I wrote this to help analyze my surprisingly complex electrical bill because custom date ranges were buggy in the Enphase app at the time)