I think you'd be surprised about the pay. Landscaping and renovating can pay very well. The trick is that you need to keep the work coming in. I have lots of friends in the construction industry and they are basically all nerds at heart. They are motivated by the technology and building/fixing things, not dissimilar to a programmer. But with any job you have to move up to management. If you can't exploit technology to do the job then the physical demands can bear down on you.