What To Do If You are Second Guessing A Hands-on

Question: Are there any projects that you wish you hadn’t Hands-on-ed? I am in the middle of one that is not going smoothly and I am second-guessing my decision not to hire it out. – Holly

Answer: This question comes up fairly frequently – it even popped up during the Q&A portion of our talk at the Richmond Home & Garden Show earlier this month. The truth is that we both have trouble recalling a project that we got to the end of and said “man, I wish we hadn’t DIYed that one.” Perhaps it is that post project rush of victory, the relief of completion, or the joy of saving money? Or perhaps it is like childbirth and you forget the pain in hindsight? But there certainly have been PLENTY of projects that have elicited a major “what were we thinking?!?” moment mid-way through. I will even cop to shedding a few tears over one. Okay, perhaps two.

So I thought I’d break down four projects that nearly broke me down and share what each one has taught me (spoiler: it is not to stop DIYing, it is simply to Hands-on smarter).

#1: The Bathroom Demo. I was still working my 9-5 at the time and Sherry was pregnant with Clara, so I carved out a Saturday to smash out all of the existing tile in our first home’s only full bathroom. This was my first major reno project and I simply totally underestimated the time, strength, and endurance it would require as well as the gigantic mess it would make. You can practically feel the exhaustion in the words of my post from back then.

Lesson Learned: Seemingly plain projects like removing the old stuff can be simply as taxing and time consuming as installing the new stuff – especially in an older home where you are dealing with mortar and metal-mesh behind every last tile. But learning this the hard way means that we have become better at accounting for that step in our planning moving forward, and renting equipment that makes it easier (like the demolition hammer that saved me at the end of bathroom demo). So now, whether it is removing old carpeting or clearing the land for our deck (this is foreshadowing, btw) – we go into it expecting it to take time and energy, instead of blindly saying “we will have that done in an hour, tops.” In some cases it has even lead us to hire out a demo step, like removing the beams in our home’s sunroom for $200, so we could get to the lively stuff faster and save our aching backs.

#2: The Patio. This was a project that we in fact contracted out at our first house, but chose to tackle on our own at our second one. The crew at the first house knocked it out in a day, but we knew better than to expect any sort of speed for ourselves. We did rely on a local stoneyard to assist us calculate and deliver materials, but somehow in ordering three tons of gravel we did not quite the connect the dots that we’d later be manually moving and spreading three tons of gravel into place. So despite our best efforts to manage expectations, it still turned out to be a back-breaking job that had me and Sherry crying for mercy more than once (though not literally crying – that one comes later).

Lesson Learned: Moving materials from point A to point B can be a lot harder than it sounds, so take advantage of any assist you can get – whether it is having supplies delivered to your site (which we did) or having a few extra sets of hands around when it comes time to haul something (which we did not). There is not much glory in hauling or lifting stuff, so it is something we have become more willing to pay for in dollars, instead of paying for it in lost time or aching muscles.

#3: The Deck. If I were not going in chronological order, this is the one that would likely top my list of Most Second Guessed While It Progressed projects. And it took virtually forever to complete, so there was a lot of time to freak out. Oddly sufficient, in the end I have strong pride in completing this project – and I gained plenty of new confidence in my abilities – so I do not wish I had contracted it out at all. It truly is one of my proudest accomplishments to date. But there were a few times that I was on the brink of turning the project over to the professionals.

It was a ideal storm of some of my least go-to things about any project:

• Plenty of manual labor (even though materials were delivered to our house, there was still plenty of lugging and lifting)
• Plenty of uncertainty (it was unlike any project we’d ever taken on, so there were plenty of unknowns and unfamiliar challenges)
• Plenty of pressure (having to execute a structurally sound construction and pass multiple county inspections)
• Plenty of heat (it was summertime in a quite sunny outdoor spot)

The one element we were sure to eliminate from the story was a time crunch. We did not give ourselves a deadline, which is the only thing that made all of those “hiccups” (that is putting it gently) bearable. And again, it is likely the project I have the most pride in completing – likely because it was my toughest. Oh yeah, and it totally made me cry once thanks to being totally exhausted and then falling and hurting my back. Still not sure whether it was the exhaustion or back pain that brought on the tears.

Lesson Learned: If all else fails, try to eliminate or reduce the time pressures of a project or loosen up a especially strict budget if you can. Giving yourself the gift of a more flexible deadline or a budget with a little more padding can truly turn those “how will I ever recover from this mistake??” moments into an “I can get through this” Rocky-music rally moment. And oh yeah, make sure your next house already has a deck so you do not have to build one again. (I am kidding. Kind of.)

#4: The Hardwood Floors. This one makes the list because we totally disregarded the lesson that we learned from the deck: do not rush yourself. When our second house sold much faster than we expected, it caught us by surprise… and suddenly gave us a deadline for removing all of the upstairs carpeting, painting all the trim and doors up there, and installing the hardwoods. While we owned the house for a while before moving in, the priority had been to get our second house ready for sale. Then when our old house sold before even hitting the market (as opposed to around 6 weeks later, which is how long our first house took), suddenly those six weeks that we thought would be built into the process were gone and our closing date was looming a few weeks away, with all of that carpeting, trim, and hardwood flooring to deal with.

We did our best to learn from our previous projects by carving out time for demo (i.e. carpet removal) and enlisting my parents to watch Clara a few times so we could have two sets of hands doing as much as possible. But we still found ourselves racing the clock at the end, which translated to some especially long and tiring days of under-pressure floor laying. This one made me shed tears of frustration more than once, and this time I cannot deflect blame an injury. I was simply dead tired and ridiculously ready to be done with laying plank after plank, day after day, in every seemingly endless room, hallway, and closet. And Sherry was right there with me. We were like a couple of cooks cutting onions. At midnight. While laying floors.

Lesson Learned: Even the best laid plans can blow up in your face. So by now we simply do our best to expect at least one or two project derailments (and sometimes four or five) while reminding ourselves why we are DIYing something in the first place. Perhaps we are saving money (which we certainly did with the floors). Perhaps we are learning a new skill (which can propel your whole house-journey forward and allow you to tackle bigger and better projects down the line). And perhaps at the quite least we are proving something to ourselves about perseverance and determination (there is nothing like dusting your shoulders off when you are done, both literally and figuratively).

But if those things are not the in cards, perhaps you will decide that you are dealing with a job that is best left to the professionals – and there is no shame in handing it over. Especially if you did a little bit of the up-front stuff before realizing it was best left to an expert (every little bit helps, so that supremely annoying realization likely comes with some money-savings from the stuff you did before hiring someone). In a strange way, as our Hands-on know-how has grown, we feel more comfortable with calling in a pro. We will gladly contract out work like our bathroom plumbing issue, our yard-leveling adventures, and larger electrical or load-bearing jobs that are simply plain out of our skill set. After all, when you know simply how taxing certain jobs might be, there is certainly a compact thrill when you get to watch someone else take that off your plate. Especially if it leaves you sufficient steam to tackle something else on your list at the same time…

PS: If you want to read more about how we decide whether or not to tackle a project ourselves before starting, check out this post which bullets some of the evaluation criteria that we use before diving in.