It does come down to mindset. I do my yard work, 1 acre, mowing, edging, trimming, leaf blowing, raking, etc. My entire mindset when I do it is, "It's exercise". I do car repairs and own 2 classic cars. My mindset is "It's yoga!" There's the fun of figuring out how to solve problems I haven't, I work with computers all day and I get to work with my hand. My family gets to see me do things and it's very important for them to know they can do things and solve problems by themselves, I sometimes involve them so it's not me alone but a family thing. The mindset is very important. allow yourself to make mistakes, have fun with it. It's never been this easy! First go to youtube, watch a few videos, read a book or blog and get to work. What I find that makes it frustrating for a lot of people is not having the proper tools, extra hands if needed and knowledge.
If it’s your gardens or your toy car it’s a different experience than if it’s your family bathroom or family car. There is time pressure and angst at not having your daily use things in working order
If it is your family bathroom or car, if you have worked on it before, chances are that you can deal with a problem on the spot thanks to the skills you learned and the tools you got for the occasion. No need to wait for the handyman.
And if it is a problem you can't solve, you may also have better understanding, which makes explaining the situation to a professional easier.
The entire premise here is that's not the case. The repair/remodel drags out because you're doing it in your spare time, and mistakes and setbacks are a drag on your motivation. Meanwhile you and your family aren't able to use your main bathroom (or whatever), and that stresses you out, makes you feel guilty that progress isn't happening faster.
I get this, and will call a handyman for some jobs, but I try to do repairs and "upgrades" myself when the work seems manageable to me.
I guess it depends on where you live, but getting an electrician around here takes so much time and effort, not to mention money, you could by half way through to training for a journeyman degree by the time he shows up.
Perhaps a downside of becoming halfway proficient as a handyman is all the people asking for your help. But you can see it as an upside as well, if they are friends and you enjoy helping them out.
Also the tools you might not have for that particular repair typically cost as much or less than the service call would cost. Except once you have the tools and know how the next service call is free whereas if you got someone to do it for you, you’ll have to pay just as much the next time around.
Heh, I tend to agree with this. Unfortunately reality always seems to disagree. No matter how simple the job, _something_ new will go wrong that requires multiple trips to home depo, putting it back together & ordeing parts off amazon, or bodging together some sort of fix that's kinda trash but gets the stupid thing working again today.
If there was a physical "undo" button, I could get behind this philosophy; however I notice neither a compiler to point out small mistakes nor an undo to help out with big mistakes. Having transformed some small plumbing things from easy to fix to really expensive to fix, I'm happy to know I live in a society with some degree of specialization. The plumber mightn't know they need to have good error handling policies, but they use my company's products, and we all go home happy. (This is also why I'm not in ops, except the odd heroic fire-fighting exercise; when I'm bored I like to change things to increase my knowledge of how it all works; I need worried and steady co-workers to keep things running).
> If there was a physical "undo" button, I could get behind this philosophy
I had two reactions to this -
The first is that's part of why I like working on low-stakes physical projects - especially when I'm working in my garden, I'm almost aggressively improvisational, just trying to use whatever's on hand to do the job and fixing things as I go. Because the garden is mine and just an absolute hobby, I get to play around, and the feeling of satisfaction I get from cobbling something together to solve a problem easily matches delivering a carefully-done plan.
The second is that undo button makes us sloppy. I noticed this the first time I went into management - the hardest part of the job was I had no idea if I'd done something right and no way to do it again if I didn't. It's made me sloppy a few other places as well, where I've found myself staring at something and thinking "well shit, there's no undo here, is there?" I think spending some time with some things that have stakes and can't be undone is healthy, and I think programming somehow makes us both sloppier and more risk-averse by its almost unbounded undo-ability.
Parenting was where I learned how to live with the lack of an undo. One gets used to it, but I find cyberspace much easier: I can try 1000 things in a few days and come out with a solution that seemed maybe impossible up front. Although one does get many chances to hone the interactions with kids, mistakes are not zero cost :) and once the parent and kid really master something, the kid grows a bit and the old solution reaches the end of its validity.
I would emphasize both that the undo-ability is very freeing and that the compiler/tests guardrails let one focus on the novel part rather than the routine part.
> My family gets to see me do things and it's very important for them to know they can do things and solve problems by themselves
Completely agree! The number of people I know who I think would struggle to know whether to hold the plastic or metal end of a screwdriver is depressing to me. I want my kids to grow up with a basic knowledge of mechanics, mechanisms, repairs/maintenance, and experience the world as things that can mostly be understood (and created) rather than things that are conceived and made by others and merely consumed by "normal people".
It also has saved a fair amount of money over the years, but the mindset is more important to show my family than the dollars.
When I need to work on something around my house that's new to me, I'll spend a little time watching videos of other people doing the thing. That gives me enough of an idea of how involved the work is.
If it's not going to be a quick or easy fix, I then do the calculation of whether or not I want to trade time that I would normally spend on myself or my family for the project. These days there aren't many things that meet that bar. I guess I would frame it as "spend your time wisely because you are rapidly running out of it".
My dad died a few years ago and I've never once wished he had spent more time working on stuff around the house. We would occasionally get in the car and drive somewhere inconsequential talking the entire time. That's what I wish I had more of. All the other stuff I can get from YouTube.
Some of my fondest memories are of my Dad and I working on things together. One of the things I most valued about him was his willingness to dive in and learn how things worked, and sometimes even fix them. To each their own, I suppose.
A car ride is one of the absolute best places to have a conversation. No interruptions, nobody shows up, just enough scenery changing to keep you looking around, but not in view long enough to keep you distracted.
I lived in a pretty small, rural area and my dad loved to drive. Everything he saw could trigger some kind of story. Plus there were random stops for ice cream which was awesome.
With my kids (who are in college now), there's no way they are going to sit around while I try to fix the sink. If I want to spend time with them, I have to give some consideration to their preferences.
This is so important to me. I find its an enormous value of mine to make sure that my kid knows what can be fixed, even if not how to fix it. So many people don't even know its possible to fix many things, so they don't learn, they don't try (and of course they give professionals a huge amounts of money for things that require 30 mins and a $2 part)
Definitely comes down to mindset. And circumstances. And, as you note - having adequate tools for the job. (Not necessarily the ideal tools, but enough to get the job done without it turning into a grind.)
Working on my tractor in the summer, when it mostly sits idle anyway? A pleasure, I can tinker with it a few hours every now and then and bring it all back into working order before I need it. It almost feels like meditation, being focused on fixing a very real problem rather than optimizing some abstract piece of code.
If it is in the middle of winter, freezing inside the shed and I NEED it to be working by next morning in order to clear the snow, thus enabling the kids to get to school and my wife and I to work?
Not quite as enjoyable.
But, as you say - with the proper mindset and a can-do attitude, it is incredible what tasks you can figure out how to do by studying the problem, asking for a little help, looking stuff up on the 'net.
Experience? That is recognizing the tasks you had better leave to someone else. :)
Oh man, I got to "rejetting carbs" and had the momentary urge to toss a chair out a window and then dive out after it. Kudos if you'll do your own carb work, that's where I draw the line.
Unless you've got a burning desire to perform stupidly fiddly restorations on old lawnmowers there really isn't. You couldn't pay me to own a gas powered tractor, and EV conversion kits are starting to get good enough that dicking around with anything smaller than a dragster is less like a reasonable hobby and more like a weird fetish at this point. Full disclosure: I've got a holly 4 barrel sitting in a box waiting to go on my 62 fairlane this fall. I may be a glutton for punishment.
Yep, folks will come at this kind of things their own ways, and that’s all good.
I likewise care for an acre, and fix as much as I reasonably can — from the small to the large. I once avoided a “dominos” problem when a built-in fridge died, which they no longer made parts for, and was a different size than today’s so the cabinetry would need redone, which would make the rest of the kitchen look worn, which would make the wood floors look worn (all in all, I was facing lots of zeros).
Then I thought for a while and decided to test all the capacitors on the PCB (in place, which required buying a tester). About $150.08 and two days later the fridge was working (the eight cents was for the bad cap).
That said, I know my limits and call in the “pros” for jobs I don’t relish or wouldn’t trust my own work (e.g. car brakes).
Knowing how to repair things doesn’t mean one always has to.
> I do my yard work, 1 acre, mowing, edging, trimming, leaf blowing, raking, etc
I truthfully can't imagine caring about how my yard looks that much. It will get mowed when it gets too long but otherwise I let whatever wants to grow, grow, and spend maybe an hour tops on it every couple of weeks. My family would much rather do things with me than see me toil away on a green hellscape.
Oh man, agreed. When I a teenager, my family moved to a house that had 3 acres of grass. At our previous house (1/2 acre), we just had a standard push mower, and that was fine. Now we had to buy a small tractor. I remember being tasked to mow those 3 acres when my dad deemed me old enough, but he would always scold me if I did it too quickly, because he thought it wasn't safe to run it at its top speed on our hilly yard, plus he believed the tractor cut poorly if you went to fast.
Overall it was just a huge waste of time and money for everyone involved. At least the tractor had a plow attachment that was useful for clearing the driveway of snow in the winter, so it wasn't a single-task purchase. Then again, if we had a smaller plot of land, the driveway would have been short enough to handle with shovels, so...
As an adult, now we have a house out in a mountainous area where there's snow on the ground for as long as 5 or 6 months out of the year. Grass doesn't really survive there, so most of the land is just dirt or whatever strange weeds/plants will grow on it on their own. Much easier to deal with.
Grass is literally a hellscape for pollinators and the only thing that spends time on most lawns is a mower. I don’t understand it either.
“My family gets to see me swear at my old cars that get 10mpg that I insist on owning and somehow justify by imagining they’re learning anything beyond another datapoint as to why we shouldn’t all own and maintain lifeless landscapes and pollution machines that only serve to stroke our fragile egos”
I don’t have any grass of my own but just enjoyed a patch above the Dufferin terasse in Quebec City.
For others interested in alternative options to maintaining an otherwise lifeless lawn Re:wild is an organization dedicated to finding solutions to bring pollinators and biodiversity back to our cities and neighborhoods.
I love to put a good sound system in my car or tweak the suspension, but when it comes to something boring, repetitive and messy like an oil change I outsource to my local garage. I'll take my laptop with me to work in the lobby, my hourly rate is higher than theirs so I even make a little profit.
It takes me about 30mins - 45 minutes to do my oil change, it takes me 20 minutes to go the dealership, another 20 to go home and about an hour wait. So I often save about an hour of my time doing it. There's nothing mess about it, I have an overall I put on when working on cars, about $40 from amazon. I put on gloves, and pre lay paper wipes where the oil might drip. Once I'm done, I take the gloves off, clean up, toss in trash, done. The only extra is that I just have to collect the oil and once a year go dispose it when the city collects hazardous materials which costs me about an hour of work. About 10 oil changes a year and I'm saving 10 hrs. When I do physical work is the time that I take to step out of the computer and think about code.
I've done my own oil changes a few times in the past, but I don't bother anymore, and just have a mechanic deal with it. They're faster at it than I am, and I don't have to drive out somewhere special to dispose of the old oil. It ends up being cheaper to have someone else do it, too. I also don't drive all that much, so I don't have to worry about timeliness here; I can just have them do the oil change when I bring the car in for some other servicing.
I get that you want to do it yourself, and that you've made different value judgments over the various aspects of doing it yourself vs. having someone else do it. But understand that others of us have also made different value judgments, and our situations aren't always the same.
I use the 25k mile synthetic oil. Changing your oil lets in dust and so I only do it when I must, no more often. Even if your use conventional oil, 3k miles is way too often with modern oils (the oil change companies love to say 3k miles as they make a lot of money)
Being European I do my oil change once a year and since the oil disposal location is on the same street as my local garage, I need to drive there anyway so no time lost there. And as I'm working and making money in the lobby while waiting for my car to be ready, I count that as a zero loss.
You might not find it messy, but I do. I don't like doing it. And it costs me the same amount of time and money if I have my mechanic do it, so that is why I outsource it.
I dunno, it takes me about 15 minutes of actual work to change my oil, vs driving to and from the shop and waiting. It’s like a 10x time difference, and I’m still probably doing it with more care than Jiffy Lube.
If I count the time it takes me to properly dispose of the oil it takes me the same amount of time.
And I luckily have a mechanic that I fully trust with my car. They are specialised in my make and model. Even have the correct socket for the oil plug, which I do not have.
Impressive that in addition to doing the work, you also can take the oil somewhere it can be disposed of safely and properly within that 15-minute time frame.
I have about 10 5-quart jugs stashed away in my garage, I’ll eventually bring them to the auto parts store when I already need to go there for something. It’d be silly to make a dedicated trip each time.
In some jurisdictions, like in Norway, for instance, if you are a craftsman working on your own property, you are (supposed) to pay VAT on the added value your work brings to the property.
I expect very few people to report this to the authorities, unless, of course, you are going to do something which is significant enough to require you to apply for a building permit.
You earn gross income with your labor, on which you pay tax. The net is used to pay Jiffy Lube, which pays employer taxes on the mechanic’s labor, and passes that cost onto you, the customer. If you do your own labor for yourself, pay neither.
My take is... if you do something because you enjoy it, go for it. We all have hobbies and stuff we like doing. If instead you do something because it saves you money, do some math first to check if your time isn't more valuable. I might be, it might not be, but think about it and only then make the call.
I got a lawn guy to do about the 1/2 acre that I keep mowed. At the time, I was traveling a lot and there are certain times of the year when you just can't let things go. This year I hired his crew for a couple because the state of my property had just gotten overwhelming so they did a lot of cutting, weedwhacking, etc. It's still very far from pristine suburban--I basically live in the country--but it got me to the point where I could spend a reasonable amount of time to get things under control. (I'm also basically spending the summer to get a bunch of interior stuff in my house done as well.)
