Fixing up your house by yourself can seem like a good idea. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case since it largely depends on your experience.
In today’s blog, we’ll be discussing the pros and cons of doing home renovation by yourself.
Pros
Unfortunately, there aren’t many pros besides potentially saving money. Since doing so requires you have the right experience and knowledge to completing the job correctly.
For certain jobs such as painting, flooring and perhaps backsplash tiling, you can get away as a beginner, but that’s about it. And even these jobs can go wrong and end up costing you more money in the long run.
Cons:
We highly recommend that the typical homeowner do not try and do the vast majority of home renovation jobs themselves. Here are some of the reasons as to why.
1. Many jobs are illegal to do without a license!
As well as being illegal, unlicensed DIY on projects such as electrical work or plumbing are dangerous for everyone involved.
When doing anything that alters the footprint of your home, a permit is required. If you carry out such jobs without one, then wave goodbye to the easy sale of your home. It becomes much more difficult for the sale to go through if the permits are not identified.
In many cases, you may need to redo the job, thus costing you even more money. Hiring a certified contractor means the difficult jobs can get done, and the process of acquiring a permit can be made much easier.
2. Many jobs require specialist tools
If you’re the typical homeowner, it doesn’t make sense for you to have expensive specialised tools in your house. Unfortunately, you need these specialised tools for many technical jobs.
If you were to do the home renovation or remodelling yourself, you’d have to buy these tools, which hardly makes sense if you’re planning on using them only once. Furthermore, if you do go ahead and purchase, it wouldn’t make sense for you to buy the best one since it will usually cost significantly more. Even though it’s more expensive, it’s the best one for a reason. So it’s likely that your project will take longer and won’t be as good as it would be if you were using the best tools for the job!
For contractors, the opposite is true. Since we use these tools all the time, it makes sense to own them and own the best ones. And because we use the tools all the time, we develop mastery of them. This allows us to do the best job in the least amount of time possible, thus saving you money and giving you peace of mind.
3. Doing the home renovations or remodelling yourself is risky
Since you’ll typically lack the experience of a pro, you’ll likely make costly mistakes. Furthermore, if you opted for Cransten, our work comes with a 90-day warranty, which ensures all the negatives of something going wrong are mitigated as swiftly as possible. If, however, you the job yourself, there is no such cover. You’ll have to incur the costs of doing the job incorrectly. And the probability of that is higher since you’re not familiar with the tools you’re using and the job you’re using them for. This also means you cannot guarantee the quality or even if the job will be done. Which you totally can when you use Cransten.
4. Doing home renovations or remodelling yourself will probably take longer
Again, this will apply to the typical homeowner. It’s no surprise that someone who’s done the job perhaps thousands of times will be able to do it much faster than someone who’s doing it for their first time.
5. Doing home renovations or remodelling yourself will probably cost you more!
At the start of this blog, we mentioned that doing the job yourself can save you money. However, that was only true if you were fairly experienced doing that job.
Otherwise, research has shown it can be 200-300% more expensive to DIY! Why? Because people who don’t know what they’re doing tend to make mistakes that someone who’s been there before can effortlessly avoid. To correct those mistakes, that experienced person will need to come in and repair them, which costs even more money than it would if they’d just done it the first time round!
In that case, not only will you incur the costs of having done it yourself, but you’ll also have to incur the costs of hiring a professional to redo it! And this figure doesn’t even include opportunity cost, which is the lost value of your next best alternative. In this case, working on your career or business would probably yield you way more money; therefore, doing anything other than that would lose you that money you would have made!
Ultimately, whether it’s a pro or a con to do home renovations or remodelling yourself depends on the project and your experience level with it.
If you need any help with any home renovation project, we’d be happy to help. Give us a call for a FREE consultation.