Saving Money Doing It Ourselves
Posted on December 3, 2007 by Eric
Filed Under Household
About a week ago, Melissa wrote about how we were considering doing much of the work on the new house ourselves in order to save money. We’ve chosen to do quite a bit ourselves and save the money we would have spent otherwise. So far it’s working well but taking most of our time. We’re a little bruised and battered from all the physical labor, but after we’re done I think we’ll be happier that we took the time and effort to do it ourselves.
One thing we wanted to do was to add some protection to the walls in the room where we put our litter boxes. We wanted something that looked nice, like Wainscoting, but would add some extra protection to the walls around the litterbox area. We got a quote from a contractor who said it would be $800 in labor alone. We talked to Melissa’s father who had done some of this kind of work before and he offered to drive into town to help us and supply the tools we would need. With his help, we got it done in a single day and it looks great! We saved the $800 in labor by doing it ourselves. I’m not sure how much we saved in parts because we didn’t pursue the work with the contractors but I think we probably saved some money there too. Best of all, I learned a lot about working on a house and used several tools I hadn’t had much need for before and also got time to bond with Melissa’s father which was great. Because her family lives about 4 hours away, we don’t get to see them much, so it was a big deal for them to come up to help us.
We’ve also decided to do the grout sealing ourselves. This has been time consuming and physically a bit rough (your knees and wrists take a beating), but not horrible. We had gotten a quote for $1400 to get the grout sealed (it was an estimate based on square footage so the price might have gone up if they actually came out to quote the work). We spent $100 on sealer so far, and about 3 days (working around other tasks and appointments around the house). We probably didn’t have much choice here because we had not budgeted nearly enough for what we had been quoted. It’s been good honest work and that feels really good too. We may be working at the house about 14 hours a day now, but when we’re done, we’ll have everything in place for our upcoming move.
We were also considering a few other things. This is how they’ve turned out so far :
- Pest treatment - we opted for the professionals. We’ve got many different kinds of spiders here, as well as scorpions, and were unsure of how to treat for them ourselves. We got a one time treatment (we didn’t want to be locked into a regular monthly treatment) which should last about 6 months.
- Landscaping/Sprinkler system - we don’t need this right away so we’ve postponed it so we can have more time to save up for it and do it right (possibly Xeriscaping things).
- Ceiling fans - We don’t need these right away either so we’re postponing this one as well. We’ll have more time to save up for matching fans too. We’ll install these ourselves, possibly with the help of some experienced friends.
- Storm door installation - We’re going to try to save the $100 installation fee by doing it ourselves. If it proves to be too much, we can always call in the professionals.
So far, we are right about on budget. Some things we’ve gone over, but we managed to save money in different areas by researching the best deals or in some cases getting really lucky (Sears had a sale on garage door openers at the perfect time for us).
It feels good to come home exhausted and get a good nights sleep, but I’m missing my time reading and writing. I hope to have a few more moments where I can write up a quick as time (and energy) permits.
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Ceiling fans are such a pain!!! Especially if you have vaulted ceilings.
Also, I really suck with electricity and decided to do it myself (now my remote doesn’t work). So if you get a fan with a remote, and you’re not good with electricity, you should probably find a friend that’s good with it or just pay for someone to do it.
We’ve done our own wainscoting too, and it saves tons of money! This last weekend, we built a new closet, which was super easy & fairly inexpensive as well.
We do a lot of the work on our house as well for the same reason - to save money and I noticed you paid for pest control. Anything with chemicals is usually worth the money. My husband researched the price of chemicals and found out that we wouldn’t save that much by doing our lawn treatments ourselves and then we didn’t have to worry about the chemicals! We did do our own bug bombing before we moved into the house, but we’ve been lucky that we don’t have much of a pest problem.
@BuildAndSucceed - We talked Melissa’s brother into coming over and helping us with the fans. I’m not good with electricity either.
@Jennifer - I really enjoyed doing the wainscoting. It can really make a room look nice, and it wasn’t terribly difficult. Did you build the closet yourself with drywall and all? I need to learn to do something like that too. I’d love to have a closet in my study.
@Jennie - We have some serious pest problems here. We’re right near a wooded area and the construction just gets them all riled up. I tried to do my own bug spraying this year and it didn’t work so well. After 3 treatments we still had bug issues. Thanks for the comment!