Paying For What You Can Do Yourself
It’s the end of the year and all I feel like I’m doing is spending money.
Besides the normal Christmas presents, we’re getting a new fence put in, having a plumber to come in and look at our slow sewer drainage, paying someone to take leaves away, getting a veneer to replace a 20+ year old bonding over a broken tooth and buying eyeglasses.
Wow. That’s a long list with a hefty price tag!
Sometimes, heft price tags are the price you pay to keep things moving along smoothly. An old fence can break and result in injury, especially when unwelcome teenagers are jumping over it. Sewer pipes can back up some nasty stuff so we want to avoid getting to that point. Leaf cleanup is just a necessity of life, not to mention decomposing leaves can get slippery and result in falls.
I think you get the picture, here.
I recently read a book called Money Can Buy Happiness by MP Dunleavey. MP is a writer for MSN and the New York Times. The interesting thing about MP is that she’s not a finance genius; she’s just a normal person trying to dig her way out of debt, budget for her family, which includes a baby and stay-at-home husband. She has an emergency fund and retirement to save for, just like everyone else, too.
In her book, she talks about how money can help you to buy the things that allow you to spend time on the truly enjoyable parts of your life. An example from my list above, the leaf cleanup. Fall cleanup makes both me and my husband miserable. It really is misery. The leaves don’t finish falling until December and there are a ton of them from our eight or so quite large deciduous trees. I cleaned the front yard earlier in the season and, despite a lawn vac and mulching the leaves before dumping, I spent probably three hours and didn’t really finish because I filled up all of our trash cans, which is between 300 and 350 gallons. The front yard has two deciduous trees and the rest are in the back to give you an idea about the quantity we’re talking about. The hubby and I are allergic to grass, trees and all things nature in general, so after spending that long working in the yard up close and personal with yard debris, we feel absolutely miserable and my allergies usually last for a day post-allergy event so it truly is the gift that keeps on giving.
An army of men to finished our yard in 2-3 hours. Could we have done it? Yes. It would have taken us so much longer, probably over 10 hours, to do with our tools instead of the super duper truck that came and sucked up all of the leaves the guys blew out to the curb. They did a great job, much better than we ever would have.
Was this a waste of money because we could have done it for free? Free is a relative term because our time is valuable to us. Instead of wasting a nice weekend (or three) leading up to the holidays just cleaning up the yard, we were able to spend time with family or planning Christmas activities. I’m starting to kick myself for not doing this sooner!
Now, don’t go looking for that Merry Maids truck to be pulling up outside of our house anytime soon. We’re still generally do-it-yourselfers. We do most of our own car maintenance (I even change my own oil!) If something breaks, my husband’s first reaction is to get a schematic to try to fix it. The hubby even fixed our broken ice maker for less than $40, something that would have cost us over $300 from a professional.
A little indulgence to save ourselves many hours of misery seems like a bargain at $170, when I put it in perspective.
Do any of you have any confessions to share about what you pay others to do than you are perfectly capable of doing yourself? Do you have any guilt associated with it?
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December 27th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
I am an absolute die Hard DIYer. A few years ago, just before I got married, I had moved back in with my mom for a little while. Starting in October her toilet would not flush. I tried some basic stuff, I plunged it, i bought clog remover stuff, I bought a 50 ft snake. With the 50 ft snake, I felt it snag and I could not push through it. So, I rented an electric snake. I used that thing for hours trying to get through the clog in the line until I broke the bit on it. Finally I decided that the line must have collapsed as it was a 50 yr old terracotta pipe. So I started digging up the line, and realized that the line went under the patio. I was not about to dig up and replace the patio, so I decided to disconnect the old pipe at the house, reroute the line and run a new pipe. I dug up the sceptic tank, borrowed a backhoe, dug a new trench for the new line, and installed a new pipe from the house to the sceptic tank. I filled in the trench then filled in the sceptic tank, only to discover…it still did not work. So, I decided that the tank must be full. I dug the tank up again, called in the tanker to suck out the poo, filled in the tank again, and great success!! It worked… for 2 days. I was so frustrated, I could not think of what else it could be. Finally, my GF at the time, now my wife suggested that I call a plummer. I laughed at her. She convinced me (see a trend here, my wife always seems to convince me to do things I don’t want to do). I call a plummer, he puts a camera down the line, sees nothing, so he digs up the tank, has the tanker suck it out again, gets down into the tank (I wouldn’t even concieve that!), and finds out the the outflow from the tank to the leech field is clogged. He unclogs it, fills it in, charges me a ridiculous amount of money, and it is fixed!! For 6 months. Now what is happening is that when the ground freezes, or the creek overflows, that leech field is either frozen and clogged, or flooded and clogged.
The point is, I will only call someone if I am out of options AND my wife told me to. Both conditions must be met.
December 28th, 2007 at 1:10 pm
Wow. I’m not into the DIY plumbing work. Steve is some, but I think he’d draw the line at working with a septic tank. Bleah.
It sounds like it is just a nightmare.
What can you do about a frozen or flooded leech field?
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:53 pm
There are a few things that I can think of. One would be to dig it up and gravel it all out or put in some kind of serious drainage. Both ways extremely time consuming, back breaking and moderately expensive. That would be something I would probably farm out. Using that info, It would be almost cost prohibitive to do it myself. Others would have the proper equipment, it would take them less time, and with their labor and the cost of materials it would only be slightly more than if I did it myself.