The Appeal of Do-It-Yourself

We have all run into cases where we tried to hire a professional, and they just didn’t seem to get what we wanted. By the end you spent a bunch of money to get something you don’t love.

This situation is a great place to apply the idea of “problem-havers” versus “problem-solvers” that I introduced in my last post. It’s crucial, and surprisingly difficult to have good communication between the two sides.

Knowing that you as the problem-haver will need to share your pain with the problem-solver might explain something we all learn eventually: communication skills as a professional are key. When vetting potential pros, we are trying to evaluate both their skills, and their ability to understand our pain.

Sometimes we learn during a project that we’ve made a mistake and hired someone who doesn’t “get” our issues. If you find yourself in that situation or chose to hire someone knowing they didn’t have great communication skills, one option as the problem-haver is to meet them halfway, either by bringing in a second expert or learning how to do it yourself.

For many folks that defeats the point of hiring a pro, but a simpler fix like turning to AI may teach you enough to help bridge the gap too.

Another option is to plan to do-it-yourself from the start. Instead of needing to communicate with someone else, playing both the role of problem-haver and problem-solver eliminates the gap.

DIY introduces new challenges that stop a lot of folks from taking this path. If I do something myself, I have to learn how to do it and maybe buy a bunch of specialized tools. Hire someone, and this might be their 100^th time doing the same thing.

And yet, there are many folks who choose to take the extra time and headache. As one of them, I’ve tried to articulate why. It can be cheaper… though that’s not really what drives me. I don’t have to plan ahead as much (find and hire a contractor), but that’s not really a deciding factor either.

Now, I think this problem-haver versus problem-solver framing is the answer. When I DIY a project, I don’t have to figure out how to articulate what it is I want (or justify the extra cost). If I want things a certain way, I can have them. All I have to do is figure out how to pull it off.

Sometimes the feature I want is a bad idea that a professional could have steered me away from. But again, we’re back to communication skills. Sometimes folks do a bad job explaining why something is a lousy idea. You end up wondering if they just don’t want to spend the extra hour doing the thing you asked for. I hope the people who painted my house under the previous homeowners had that discussion when they decided to caulk every outlet down before painting.

The list of things I plan to hire out gets longer when I do projects. I learned the hard way why the general consensus is to hire out drywall and tile, and I never intend to do those tasks myself again. But the fact that I’ve tried it puts me in the perfect position to clearly communicate with pros I might hire in the future.

To close this post with something actionable, what tasks are worth trying at least once for you? If you don’t want to build it yourself ever, how do you get the knowledge you need to talk with the pros you hire?