Also, shoutout to the Methow! The North Cascades is such a beautiful area in general.
And on the plus side, I've found out how easy it is to fix taps and replace door handles and all the simple stuff!
Maybe the article overstated their woes, but it sounds like they were very under prepared. And winging the technical parts. Like software the easy part is the build. The harder part is research and planning.
I have notions of retiring someday and run a wood shop. But I'm working on learning the basics and doing small projects.
My plan to build a custom shelf unit for our kitchen went over-time and over-budget (in the small). Reason: once it was made it became apparent that it lacked strength against skewing deformations, which would not happen ‘laterally’ given where it was sitting but would happen ‘dorsoventrally.’ (Apologies for the anatomical language—it could wiggle side-to-side along its width and who cares because there are walls on either side, but if it wiggles back and forth away from the wall behind it then maybe things start falling off of it or maybe it just collapses some day.)
This sort of problem is of course solved with crossbeams, but like then I had to buy a bunch of wood that was the right width, calculate an approximate length and miter angle for four pieces, of course I did not have the tools to make pocket holes properly (woodworking co-ops closed, thanks COVID) so I just did it roughly (you predrill the screw hole backwards from the flush surface back to the side of the lumber, then you use that hole to guide drilling the pocket) and of course I screwed up one of these four by drilling the pocket too deep because I didn’t have a drill press (thanks again COVID) and so I start low-teching that by just masking-taping the drill bit out to the appropriate depth so that I don't go over. Finally a pair of crossbeams goes in and... it's not symmetric. I think “eh you only see those edge-on so who cares” and install the other beams but the lack of symmetry in installation actually really matters because it means that the crossbeams are pushing the posts off-level, which means the shelves are off-level. Whoops. So this “it is finally ready!” moment turns into a “no it’s not!”
Then, a clever idea: pre-join the cross-beams together at the center of the X (they were not joined initially) before installing them, so they have to be symmetrical. Slight problem: the predrilled holes from attempt #1 in the side beams are now still pulling the crossbars in weird ways and attempting to mess with the level of the shelves. Solution is to just unfasten the X and swap which beam is proximal and which one is distal, then I can pre-drill the holes again, but I'd better just get the thing wood-glued in place first, even without appropriate clamps, so that I am 100% sure it is not going to take the shelves off level when I put those screws in. Finally everything works.
Irrationally undeterred from this success, I am now building a California King bed frame. It is almost exactly 50% complete—there is a facade which is stained but not finished and the center consists of two free-standing “pallets” (not actual pallets, but they look similar) which get bolted together, one pallet is finished and the other is not.
Delays so far have mostly been due to other life circumstances coming up, too much to do on weekends and hot weather baking my garage into unsafe temperatures... but there have already been a few overruns. I realized for example that at the outer corners of the bed frame my screws were going to be taking a heck of a lot of torque (the middle should have two posts side-by-side when the two pallets get bolted together, they can be a little lighter-weight) and revised my design to use some metal corner-ties. But those had a different geometry and so the 2x4s on the sides needed to be cut even shorter. Then I realized that I had calculated this ad-hoc cut assuming that it needed to be shorter by a 2x4's width on both sides but I had forgotten that I wasn't doing the same corner ties for the middle posts of the bed that get bolted together, so I bought a new 2x4 and while I was there I bought some tie plates to try to strengthen those middle posts a little more anyways. So we've only overrun the initial cost by 4 tie corners and 4 tie plates and one 2x4 which is not so bad, but still.
I do not recommend doing your own woodworking in order to save on cost, it costs a lot of time. I do recommend it if you feel like carpentry connects you to Jesus or if you have a really specific idea about what you want in a space and nobody anywhere seems to be offering that exact thing.
I built a small balcony garden off a few pine planks. Many mistakes were made along the way, some were corrected (how do you cut in straight lines with a jigsaw ? Use a maconnery ruler and a few clips), some were compensated by the overall overbuild. It took me a few months but I always expected it to take more time and money than buying it from Amazon. One nice thing is that it matches perfectly the width of the balcony! With this small success and many more, I will - maybe - have enough knowledge to build my own cabin in 40 years.
I feel personally attacked. Really though, I wonder how many things are on my 'Someday Maybe' list, that really I should just make more money to accomplish and/or find a youtube subscription that satisfies the urge to tinker on a particular topic.
When you look back on your summer/year, what will you have accomplished? What skills will you have developed?
If you don't really value a process/skill, but just want the material result (i.e. a cabin), pay a pro for it. If you just have an itch that needs to be scratched, watch someone else do it on Youtube. If you want it to be a part of who you are, pruning your list by moving items to the former two strategies should leave you enough time to develop it yourself.
I know quite a few very senior people who are proper old, and when I mentioned this to one of them, his response was, "at this point I'm glad to be alive, and no one glad to be alive has time for that stuff." This was just before he retired.
I think my life got measurably better when I pivoted from "I want to do this myself" towards "It's just as satisfying to watch someone else do this".
Downhill extreme mountain biking is really cool. And fun to watch. And expensive. And requires much more physical fitness than I've got. And dangerous (esp. given my physical fitness :). )
So true! Works for a lot of things. It's why I stopped playing dota.
Dota - the worst 'awesome thing' that can happen to your life.
It did make me a way better street rider though!
Also glad to have read this article. Was thinking (more like daydreaming) of building a Korean Hanok one day but it seems unrealistic without a lot of professional help.
If mountain biking is your dream buy a Trek with electric motor in it. They can give you extra lift till you accelerate to 75 km/hour with a dongle of $120. Instant pro biking experience without much practicing.
You are too young to accept any physical limitations of your body. Navy Seals talk about that being tired is just an emotion like feeling happy. Its all about your mindset.
It's a sad state of affairs if the exchange needs to be "please share your situation with me so I can know if it's appropriate to offer words of encouragement" before offering words of encouragement.
Lets take an example of the most brilliant people of our time while also extremely handicapt Steven Hawkins.
What would he care he was excluded in a statement like this?
But it isn't really. Even taking that statement at face value you're still talking about people who are selected for their physical skills and then spend much of their prime training and preparing physically like their lives depended on it. Because it does. But they suck at many other things and they do have an excuse to not be able to do them.
One person cannot "specialize" in too many things and downhill extreme mountain biking is not a thing to do half-assed without risking your well-being. Getting the skill and the physical strength to do it is both time consuming but more importantly very risky.
I doubt you’ll hit 75kph with a 36V Motor though. My 52V mid drive would get me to around 40–50kph on a good day, flat terrain, no wind, and pedaling hard. I put it back to 25kph max because riding so fast on a bicycle was too dangerous in my opinion... cars don’t expect you to come so fast, and I was getting too dangerously confident. I was also worried about the consequences should I get in a crash and the bike is investigated to see whether it was legal.
For those interested in diy, the tsdz2 mid drive is a pretty good motor that has a torque sensor and that you can add to most bicycles. There is also an open source alternative firmware for it that’s pretty good. See https://github.com/OpenSource-EBike-firmware/TSDZ2_wiki/wiki
You don't need to be a great mountain biker to go dangerously fast, it's very easy to become overconfident, and the downhill nature means that you might also fall from certain heights on top of already carrying speed, and not necessarily on soft dirt, maybe onto rocks or into a tree. It's a gnarly sport.
The commentator you were talking to should at least go on some mellow bike rides or something.
BUD/S has like a 25% pass rate, of people who are even allowed to try.
Not saying that a navy seal can't just decide to not be tired anymore, but for the rest of us mere mortals....
It helps.
No critique. When you have to operate under circumstances like that and your life and your fellow soldiers lives are at stake it makes sense.
Has inherent problems though.
https://sofrep.com/news/navy-seals-get-addicted-drugs-doc-is...
... in the field. Same with pilots -- they issue speed to dudes flying bombers long distances.
But they're not taking speed during selection and training. That's just you, and figuring out if you can hack it is the point.
We're building a shop. I've contracted most of the build out, but found that I could save $20,000+ by DIY'ing the radiant heat portion myself. Took about a days worth of planning and research, another to lay down the pipe before the floor was poured, and another to hook everything up.
Honestly, the cost-differential was enough to make me think that I should start a company that installs radiant heating. I can't think of many other professions where I could clear $20,000 for 3-days of work.
I'm planning to DIY the solar-install on the same shop here in a couple of months, we'll see if that's as much of success story.
Another benefit of going solo on my solar project was learning that I could legally install panels on a part of my roof that everyone else thought I couldn't use because of old setback rules. I was able to fit eight additional panels on my roof after discussing the issue with the city inspector.
Most of my prep time was spent writing my permit application. If you want to use mine as a reference or template, file an issue on my github repo for the project [1] and I'll upload it later. I'd also be happy to chat about the gear I chose, where I bought it, and share a list of materials.
[1] https://github.com/hamikm/solar-report (side note: I wrote this to help analyze my surprisingly complex electrical bill because custom date ranges were buggy in the Enphase app at the time)
My wife went to school with a guy who didn’t like college. He took a summer job on a road crew, learned how to use an excavator and got hooked. Dropped out, saved up, and bought a used dump truck, which basically made him.
Started out hauling stuff and then got into water/sewer work and excavation.
He’s up to about 20 trucks a decade later, and pays the bills with the sewer work. He leveraged the assets he had (trucks, diggers) and won demolition contracts — they make money on demolition. Like $75-200k for an emergency demolition if they can get there in 90m.
When he quit his job the parents wept. He was the first kid to go/finish University in the family.
It went from 3 guys hanging board to a 40-50 million construction company in 2 decades.
Some jobs benefit so much from equipment and skill that it won't ever make sense to DIY. Some jobs are just a bunch of labor that you could do, and probably do better because you care to do it right.
DIY solar seems like a ROI for a DIY project. Just stay safe on that roof!
Yeah - I live in a state with essentially zero incentives, so to make Solar pay for itself I have to rely on net-metering plus the 26% federal tax rebate.
If I went with a commercially installed system, I'd be looking at a 15-20 year payback. If I can DIY, I should be looking at a 6-10 year payback.
And I don't mean that in a demeaning way at all. If anything, such folks have found a middle path in life. At opposite extremes, you have folks who actually have to go do all those things versus those who can squelch their own interest in nearly anything by merely thinking about it for a few moments...
I think some people fail to understand how hard it is to be a good contractor. Just like software engineering it requires a lot of education and a lot of experience.
You won't get it right your first few tries no matter how smart you are. Just like no software developer ever got things right when they were first learning to code.
ps: school should make kids build more stuff, you get real use case for a lot of mathematical thinking out of cute stuff hands on.
Source: my brother nailed his hand to something in middle school. He's got a Ph.D now, for the record.
Building many structures (or any given sub-specialty, e.g. plumbing) on a predetermined schedule and budget and making money doing it without charging so much money that you get undercut out of business is what requires skill.
For N=1 you rarely have to be a pro to do it right.
The labor itself might be low skill, but the experience required to do the job well and to create a lasting structure takes an enormous amount of time. "should I use ceder, spruce, pine or Aztek for the exterior door casings? Should my subsill be 7 degrees or 14? Should I use felt paper or tyvek for my weather barrier, which type of tape should I use for each type?"
And this is why companies hire a hundred fresh grads for every gray hair. 99x/100 they don't need super high quality work output.
In all trades there's a hesitation to look at something and say "screw it, it doesn't really matter, just do what's cheap" unless you're being told to and software isn't immune from that (in software "told do" seems to come mostly in the form of time pressure whereas in the trades it's what the number job is paying). Sure it's nice to do "good" high quality work but a lot of the time it really isn't necessary or it's strictly wrong because whatever it is you're building needs to be built to a price point. It's only when you push things to the limit do all the little marginal details (the stuff the experienced pros get right) start mattering. That tends to accidentally happen more (at least in my estimation) in software than the trades because labor is so expensive and code is so easily portable.
Also, janky setups and quick-n-dirty fixes abound in all trades. You just only see them in trades you know about.
If timeline isn't the most critical factor a homeowner can do an excellent job. Often even better than the professionals because you will be willing to spend extra time and attention to get everything perfect.
And then get the wrong stuff, which the contractor will make do anyway if there's even the remote possibly it will work. and so on. After a while and some $$$ wasted you will get a feel for what's reasonable and what's bogus.
I became a homeowner as a never-interested DIY with EE/CS degrees. We had an unfinished basement that we paid the builder to finish only the electrical, plumbing, and framing. I'd always heard drywall'ing was easy so I left that for me to do.
At the time I knew nothing about lighting, fixtures, eletrical work, etc. Ended up agreeing to J-boxes for basement lights rather than cans, and a few other money-saving things (for the electrician).
Before doing the drywall myself, I ended up rerunning all the basement lights, running tons of outlets, installed an electrical subpanel in my garage, new plumbing lines, etc. All inspected and approved on my own permits.
I maybe watched ~200 hours on youtube (easy to do at 2x speed) and read a lot of electrical and plumbing code. But when I was done it was "done right" and not done to "save money".
I ended up saving a ton of money on the electrical and plumbing, easily in the thousands, and only saved $700 on the drywall labor. Moral of the story, don't hang your own drywall by yourself. Pay for it if you can't get a couple friends to help.
The latter can really kill a project if you can't get it right consistently, preferably first time.
That's where the skill comes in - not just the physical labour, but the experience needed to make allowances for material tolerances and other possible gotchas.
Professionals (should) have that knack, amateurs rarely will.
Generally all contractors say "the next guys will take care of that". For example, when framing you don't really care if the studs are really straight or if the walls are square. The "next guy" will take care of that.
True enough, when I was drywalling I had the builder come back to take care of some bowed studs that should never have been used.
I've also volunteered at Habitat for Humanity and can confirm that very little "accurate measuring and cutting" was occurring. They'd quickly measure some things, shout out numbers, and then use a circular saw to rough cut it out. But that was it - they didn't refine it after that and went about their merry way.
I have to believe that the accuracy of a foundation is more important but I think it's a fool's dream. They get "close" and they're checked out before the "next guy" has to fix it.
Unless a 3d printer or CNC machine is responsible for the accuracy you better count me out.
The finish work is the final last guy. The guy that did our trim would randomly yell out swear words every 20 minutes. His life is hard. And he was expensive.
I do have a guest bedroom in my house where I once had some time during a holiday shutdown when my job situation was a bit perilous. I had some crumbling plaster so I put some drywall up. It's... functional.
Painting is one thing I do myself. I do it enough I got reasonably good at it and--for touchup--I can reasonably take shortcuts that someone I was paying couldn't.
I've saved myself hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years by doing my own work, but now I can only see defects everywhere because that's what I've trained myself to look for.
There are a million jobs I still need to get to, but at least I know that once they’re done I’ll be happy with the result. Having only just started down the home diy route, there’s a load to learn and I still make a lot of mistakes, but I’m improving, and it’s satisfying to know that next time I’ll get it right, faster and cheaper than before.
But I think that the schmo vs pro divide is real when you get to electrical, plumbing etc. HE’S the pro, and I’m the Schmo. As my favorite interviewer says.
IMHO, this is backwards. Electrical work is twisting wires and screwing them down. Plumbing is gluing or clamping stuff together (unless you're sweating copper). The actual mechanics of doing it takes little skill and pros aren't going to be that much better/faster than you. The real difference is the amount of knowledge the pro has of codes and how things need to be. However, the concepts for residential are pretty straight forward though and relatively easy to learn. You can pick them up starting with simple stuff.
Compare that to something like drywall. Your drywall finish work is going to suck compared to a pro and they're going to do it way faster than you could.
That said I'm a cheapskate and do my own finish work even though I hate making things look nice.
Often these pros are also the ones that are easiest to find because the ones that know what they are doing are in high enough demand that they go mainly off word of mouth and friend-of-a-friend type business.
We bought a house three years ago that was built in 2006. The number of things I've found that were done just blatantly wrong has soured my opinion of general contract labor quite considerably.
I hired someone to fix some water damage by a door about three months after we moved in. The next spring when it rained we had a literal waterfall coming in from the top of the door frame.
Never again.
I've since torn that entire wall down to the studs, cleaned everything up, put it back together correctly, and rebuilt the attached deck.
I don't know how much that would have cost to get fixed by a professional (supposing I could have found one that actually knew what they were doing), but I'm guessing it was easily $10-$20k of work if labor was factored in.
Differentiating and correctly selecting the true pro out of a lineup of estimates is a skill in and of itself. For most construction tasks, I'm better at the task itself than I am at finding someone who can do it better than I can.
High skill labor usually involves lots of expensive one time costs. I don't see how there is an opportunity to save money.
This is every job ever. Wait until you see the quality of code that runs big backend systems...
I wonder what I'm not finding because it isn't listed on Zillow
People who've owned empty, vacant land for decades tend to have either inherited it or are long term real estate investors. Frequently they will have tried to sell it in the past and not gotten enough interest.
Obviously, doesn't work everywhere. Higher demand areas are going to be completely different.
But it worked for us when we decided to move to the boonies.
On one hand is taking pride in doing something yourself.
On the other hand is paying the expert to do it.
I know my limitations. In-bounds, I'll do it. Out-of-bounds, I pay the expert. I've learned my lessons and I have no regrets.
I say this from a family known for "inherited" stubbornness, cheapness, and generational Great Depression learning.
I still do things myself, but I'm more and more looking to just hire the bigger things done. I know how to do it, and probably would do it better. But I don't have the time.
I would bet that most people that try to build a cabin do it more as a passion (with bad calculation on timing and cost estimates) than as a way to save money.
There's bad outcomes and then really bad.
The Methow is a hard place to visit because you'll need to leave again.
I admire a meaningful and quick fix more than a professionalistscwork, adhering to piles of regulations for no appearing reason but let many others profit from my money.
I also understand that amateur is from latin and actually means to love what you are doing.
So get out of your comfort chair, put the gaming controler aside and re-learn some basic skills. With every project it becomes more and more rewarding.
I have little experience with handiwork but I'm imagining if an amateur developer said this in regards to building a maintainable and scalable application (as I imagine a house to be) from scratch, and scoffing at tedious time-wasters like writing tests and hiring QAs.
As an experienced developer I know the tradeoffs of cutting corners and various quick fixes and so can apply them judiciously, but I know if I ended up working on or taking over that codebase, I'd most likely end up having to tear out a lot of that developer's work and redo it, or else have a headache trying to build and improve around it.