It baffles me that our markets are so inefficient that it’s 125% more effective for me to take time off my ‘highly skilled’ engineering job to do ‘low skilled’ renovation/repair work myself.
I can only imagine all of the inefficiency comes from teams of salesmen/project managers/owners who suck all of value out.
But still how do they get away with such bad deals? Are people so pigeonholed that they can’t imagine doing the work themselves? Is getting bonded/licensed/whatever other paperwork is required to compete with these sleazy companies that difficult? I’m sure a lot of people wouldn’t mind learning how to install drain systems for $125/hr minus overhead.
If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.
I have noticed though that the large brand name plumbers are the most expensive. I think it's because they're mandated to upsell on any call. I hired one for $100 to replace some shower fixtures. But he spent 2 hours both figuring out what else he could do, and writing it all up and putting it in their database.
On that list of things was replacing the water pressure regulator. For $1500. It's a $300 part, and it screws on and off. Or you could buy a $100 restoration kit instead.
I was also recently quoted $1100 to replace two toilets. Not including the toilets. Looking online it should take 1-2 hours per toilet for an experienced plumber, and around $50-100 to dispose of each. So that's, at best, $200-$250 per hour. My hourly earnings after taxes are about $50. So I both learned how to, and replaced, the toilets in about 4 hours.
Disposing of the old toilet, eh, that is a bit more work depending on how far your local dump is.
In the 3-county rural area where I've spent most of my time recently, we have 3 Lowes, 2 Home Depots, a Menard's, multiple Orschelns and Tractor Supplies, and probably fifty smaller hardware stores and lumber yards. This is many thousands of commercial square feet basically devoted to home improvement, for an area with fewer than 140,000 residents. If it were possible to hire this sort of work without significant expense, the home supply market would be very different.
I'm not criticizing any carpenters or plumbers here. Their work is naturally seasonal and cyclical, and our society DGAF about people with that sort of work. If an electrician would wire your new bedroom for less than $3,000, he wouldn't be able to afford $1,000/month for medical insurance for his family, at least not every month of the year.
It’s worse than that. Even when you try to hire Americans, it’ll turn out that only the salesman/owner are legally working. The actual work is almost exclusively done by immigrants being paid exploitative wages.
It’s frustrating that there is actually money in the industry but such a small amount reaches the laborers.
I don’t think it’s particularly baffling. A large class of jobs, including the trades and so-called “low skilled” professions, are in very high demand - which indicates that what they do is valuable to a lot of people - and while you could theoretically do their job yourself, many people simply don’t want to “get their hands dirty.”
In my opinion that’s a good thing by the way. People who do jobs that are important for us and few people want to do should be paid accordingly.