It’s pretty dismal. And broadly speaking, it's unsustainable.
I find it a sad statement that one suggests the primary reason for DIY is out of desperation - surely I am not alone in doing many home and auto maintenance tasks myself out of primarily the enjoyment and satisfaction of learning and executing a new skill? Sure, /r/DIWhy is full of examples of ill-advised and unsafe DIY attempts, typically in electrical, plumbing, and deck-laying, but that doesn't mean that we should discourage people from learning the basics of low-risk home maintenance such as painting, tiling, flooring, etc. On the contrary I believe the reward one feels from accomplishing such tasks oneself and with the help of friends or family can have a powerful positive emotional effect on society.
That's kind of misleading, because it ignores the value of your labor. You work more hours, and you get a lifestyle improvement that can be measured in dollars. You're not preventing costs, you're changing how you pay.
If that's optimal in your specific case then great! But it's easy to imagine a person where it's not optimal at all. If Bob saves $X for every hour he spends on his house, and Bob makes $3X at his job, and he's equally happy doing either kind of labor, then Bob is a fool to do multi-hour household jobs himself.
Using time to save dollars is a tool, one that can be used or misused. You want to optimize lifestyle vs. effort, not lifestyle vs. nominal salary.
Over the long term you can either find some freelancing hours or get a job that offers a different expectation of worked hours and a different amount of pay.
So if you're out of balance you can fix it to do more of the job you want and have more leisure hours too. Or less of the job you don't want.
If I had a job where more hours directly translated into more money, 1. I would drop DIY projects and 2. I would probably become a workaholic.
But few have the talent.
And that skill usually comes from making mistakes and screwing stuff up on a previous job.
And very few people are willing and able to do the homework.
Obviously DIY and the attendant issues are entirely absent from the industrial sector, which I spend most of my time frequenting.
I would argue that DIY is more equal to assume all risk.
I don't know the characteristics of acrylic artists' paint, but there might be reason to be careful.
One thing I've also been wondering about is if repainting every other year, even with vapor-open paints, would have a similar effect. So many rental properties just end up with layers and layers of paint.
Curious what you mean?
In my experience, new paint coats are needed because of marks left on walls -- accumulated smudges, scuffs, furniture bangs, nicks, filled anchor holes, etc. None of which higher-quality paint has anything to do with... I assume?
Am I wrong? Assuming paint is applied correctly in the first place, what are the longevity benefits of using a higher-quality paint?
And you MUST use special old paint that fades very quickly to be authentic.
I did not go through because the developers stuffed up and got sued by English heritage for months.
Additionally, art acrylics are typically very thick, to allow the artist a high degree of flexibility in application density, a flexibility that's just not needed for wall application. You correctly note that labor is the major cost for house repair. In light of that, it strikes me as silly to buy a bunch of extra-thick art paint and take the time to thinning it down the the appropriate consistency for wall application, instead of just buying a volume of paint that was already at the appropriate viscosity.
An acrylic-latex intended for outdoor use is going to be formulated to account for the fact that exterior surfaces see wider temperature swings in the summer and winter, and will be more flexible in its final cured form, reducing the flaking and cracking caused by the temperature-driven expansion and contraction that comes with the seasons. The formulation is also likely to account for the greater UV exposure its going to have outside. If you try to coat the exterior of your house with art paints, you're going to be spending a lot more money, it it might not last as long than if you used a paint intended for the purpose.
Now, if your goal in either scenario is art or aesthetics, than that's a completely separate discussion. If you want the wall of your house that faces the local park to be a mural highlighting fundamental truths of the human condition, more power to you. Though, in that case, you might do better to eschew pre-forumlated paints entirely, and instead buy the raw outdoor-use formulated resins and pigments yourself, and mix as appropriate.
> The last time I let my university landlord paint my apartment, it took days to clear the furniture, and I was instructed to do no paint prep. There were peels coming down from the ceiling. The painters exploited this "paint is glue" theory by painting under the peels and pushing them flat. I channeled my desire to kill them on the spot by politely escorted them out in mid-job and never letting anyone paint for me again.
Okay, that's just sloppy work. I'd have wanted to kill them too. When I was painting commercially, if I or my supervisors had caught anyone doing that, said slacker would be off the crew permanently.
I avoided the related "designer" question of choosing off-whites. I'm a math professor, and a grad student described these walls as like being "inside a stick of chalk" (Hagoromo, given the choice).
Pure white is a color mirror. Why does that corner look pink? There's a red object in that part of the room.
The last time I let my university landlord paint my apartment, it took days to clear the furniture, and I was instructed to do no paint prep. There were peels coming down from the ceiling. The painters exploited this "paint is glue" theory by painting under the peels and pushing them flat. I channeled my desire to kill them on the spot by politely escorted them out in mid-job and never letting anyone paint for me again.
The next time I painted this apartment, I stripped the ceiling bare of its many poorly applied layers, and applied $500 of artist-grade acrylic primer and titanium white paint to the ceiling and walls. 15 years later, the apartment looks just-painted. Artist-grade acrylic paint is one of the best glues available, much more reliably so than oil paint.
In the years since, the best wall paints have come closer to artist-grade acrylic paints, and their glues are likely better tuned to typical conditions. Artist paint is more expensive and better. Carefully tuning a cheap glue is like botching an airplane hardware design and trying to fix it in software.
Later in a home, filling holes in contractor botched cabinet work, I started with artist-grade acrylic modeling putty, added just enough dye from the commercial paint manufacturer to match the existing cabinet paint, tweaked the gloss to also match, and created a one-step wood fill that disappeared into the existing paint job when dry. Much less shrinkage than commercial wood fills, and no primer or repainting needed. Again, acrylic art supplies making the best glue.