What do you hire out for if you could actually do it yourself?

[DawnM]

I mean, I get hiring out for things you don't know how to do, but we aren't really hire out type folks.   My husband grew up in a family where they fixed everything themselves.

We have some potential buyers who keep asking us who we use for our lawn service, our termite company, our roofing company, our pool company, our cleaning company, and our gardeners.

We don't have any of those people.   I think they don't believe us.

It's fine, they don't seem like people we want to sell to anyway, they are super picky about everything.   We do have (supposedly) and offer coming in either Thur or Fri from another family.  Their realtor says the offer is drawn, the money wire is all set, but they are waiting for our purchase of the easement proof before submitting.   I will believe it when I see it.

Our realtor is upsetting me and I have stopped responding much to her other than, "great," "Ok," "sure."   She called me today because she was upset with me for talking to the buyers of the other house and told me not to talk to them.    She also said, "It seems like you don't trust my expertise".  Um.....well, stop giving me reasons to doubt it!   But that is for another discussion.

For this thread.......what do you hire out for on a regular basis that you could potentially do yourself?   Anything?   

[LifeLovePassion]

We also do everything ourselves (or have the skills), but now hire out drywall taping/mudding, garage door replacement and window/siding replacement. 

[footballmom]

We are out for “mission critical” housing trades - HVAC, electrical, plumbing - repairs.

We clean our house (though I am seriously thinking about paying for someone / a service to do it) and we keep up with the yard (mowing, mulching, seeding it, etc)

[Grace Hopper]

Things we hire out for, and have established relationships with providers in the event emergent services are needed, and for making sure we have service records for potential buyers:

HVAC services

roofing inspection/repairs 

tree work on mature trees

an electrician

a plumber

termite protection (some states where termites are more prevalent require a bonded sort of maintenance)

 

Things I’d hire out for if dh or I didn’t want to do it (this to be able to provide a vendor list to potential providers):

regular pest control

regular lawn care and landscape maintenance 

regular housekeeping, at minimum a monthly or quarterly deep clean, more often for kitchen and bathrooms

IMO this second category is less important to have records/suggested vendors for; it regards items that should be visually obvious. 
 

As a buyer of a previously owned older home, I’d definitely be asking questions about the first category. But if they are serious buyers, they’re gonna order revelatory inspections.

 

And I know this wasn’t actually your question, but tbh, if I were your realtor I would also be upset about you talking directly with the sellers of the property you are interested in purchasing. In doing that you are circumventing two agents (seller’s, buyer’s) and possibly two brokers as well. Do your research, but don’t devalue your real estate contracts/contractors. jmo 

 

 

Edited September 6, 2023 by Grace Hopper

[TheReader]

We're debating a return to hiring out oil changes in the cars, b/c we're hitting a stage of life where the time/money ratio on that is leaning the other direction now. 

We *should have* probably hired out building our patio cover, or at the very least, got someone different to help us - long story, wrong thread, the project turned out great, but by the end of it, our whole family felt the cost of the initial quote to hire it out would have been well worth the lack of stress vs. the way we did it. 

Lawn, gardening, cleaning, etc. we do ourselves. 

Oh, car wash. DH buys a subscription to a car wash place (drive through, not a hand wash place) and we do that vs. washing our cars at home. 

[QueenCat]

17 minutes ago, DawnM said:

We have some potential buyers who keep asking us who we use for our lawn service, our termite company, our roofing company, our pool company, our cleaning company, and our gardeners.

 

We don't have a pool... so no pool service. We have a lawn service, pest control, HVAC service plan, termite company, and roofer. I've settled on quarterly deep cleanings and maintaining myself in-between. Probably going back to monthly soon. We do our own gardening, but it's just one oversized raised garden (3 feet off of the ground). 

Edited September 6, 2023 by QueenCat

[regentrude]

We do not hire out any services like lawn or cleaning or leaf raking. I consider these normal household tasks I can easily accomplish myself.

We hire out major home upgrade work: replacing roof and siding, laying hardwood and tile floors, installing new kitchen counters, installing a new HVAC system.

We have the HVAC company perform yearly maintenance. We also take our cars for oil change/tire rotation. 
 

Edited September 6, 2023 by regentrude

[stephanier.1765]

At the moment, I'm wishing we had hired someone other than me to lay our LVP, since I'm laid up with a bad back from the constant getting up and down. Plumbing and HVAC are the two things at the top of the list we always have someone come out for. I'm trying to decide if it's worth it to have an electrician come put in our new ceiling fan because we have never done that before, but I'll probably give it a try first before giving in and calling someone. As for lawn care, an amazing thing has happened this summer. All the folks who have riding lawn mowers are mowing everyone else's yard on the street. 

[Annie G]

We hire out lawn servicing (fire ant control, pre-emergent, fertilizer, etc.) though we do the mowing/edging/weedeating ourselves.  
We have relationships with hvac, electrician, and plumbing professionals.

Why? We can afford it now that kids are grown and flown, and also we’re in our 60’s and it makes our lives a little easier. 

[JustEm]

If we can do it ourselves we don't hire it out. And before hiring anyone, we attempt to fix most things. For example, our washer was leaking a few weeks ago and I took the top off, found the leak, ordered a replacement part and watched a YouTube video on how to replace it.

[Melissa in Australia]

We do everything ourselves. 

Appart from electrical, illegal to do own electrical in Australia. My father and brothers are electricians and do it for us. 

[Clarita]

I hire people to clean. We wish we could hire a gardener to do what we want done but usually gardeners are mow and blow or $$$$$, so we have to do it ourselves. 

We've also hired movers, people to take things to the dump, painters, etc.

Basically we hire when we have the money and don't want to do it ourselves. Part of our thinking is doing this stuff cost us money either in terms of our time or our labor. 

[lovinmyboys]

We hire just about everything out. I wouldn’t have a “roofing company” but if we needed work done on our roof we would hire it out. I think this drives my in-laws crazy because they are definitely DIY types and raised dh that way, but I admit to being kind of lazy. Dh has always worked a lot and I had the four kids by myself.  I know people who homeschool and do all the things, but I was someone who just homeschooled. 
 

[WildflowerMom]

We do pretty much everything ourselves except electrical work and some plumbing.   But I’ll add painting to the list, because neither of us will ever paint another room again probably as long as we live.  🙅🏻‍♀️👎🏼🚫

[Ausmumof3]

Septic pumping. That’s about all. And we take the cars to a mechanic. DH is generally handy with everything but every time he tries to do anything with cars it goes to pot:

But in more invisible ways I do hire out in a sense. I buy pre baked food and rotisserie chicken sometimes: I buy ready made clothes.

[alisoncooks]

19 minutes ago, hjffkj said:

If we can do it ourselves we don't hire it out. And before hiring anyone, we attempt to fix most things. For example, our washer was leaking a few weeks ago and I took the top off, found the leak, ordered a replacement part and watched a YouTube video on how to replace it.

Same. I’ve laid flooring, including tile. Replaced faucets and toilets. Installed new light fixtures/ceiling fans. Google and YouTube are miraculous things. 

[Heartstrings]

We do a lot ourselves but I do have an HVAC, plumber, electrician, and appliance repair guy that we would recommend if someone buying our house asked.  We do have a pool guy we call for repairs but we do the maintenance ourselves.  

[Melissa in Australia]

Oh yes we get the septic done 

[athena1277]

We aren’t super handy, so we do hire out for a lot of things.  We could take care of the lawn ourselves, but dh and ds have such a bad time with outdoor allergies lately that it’s just better to pay someone to do it.  The yard needs a lot of other work that I’m hoping to work on myself once it finally cools down outside.

[Pawz4me]

We pay a lawn service to do all the non-fun yard stuff.

We pay someone to groom our younger dog (but I do Avatar Dog).

We pay for oil changes and tire rotations.

Pest control

I pay the vet when one of the dogs needs their anal glands expressed. Some things are well worth the cost. 😉 

Those things we could definitely do ourselves, but for various reasons choose not to.

Other things we pay for that we maybe could do but don't want to hassle with -- -- HVAC maintenance, tree work, appliance repairs, any plumbing or electrical things beyond really simple stuff, all vehicle maintenance.

Of course we pay for septic pumping; I don't think that's a DIY thing for anyone unless you run your own septic service. 😉 

We're at a point in our lives where we frequently decide we'd rather pay for things than hassle with them ourselves.

Edited September 6, 2023 by Pawz4me

[marbel]

We hire out car maintenance and repairs. My husband could do a lot of it but we have a good, trustworthy, and affordable mechanic, and it just makes sense to hire it out instead of buying the tools, having to dispose of the oil properly, etc. I do know a lot of people who do their own (my daughter's boyfriend takes care of her car for her) and that's fine, but it's not for us. We would also pay for a new roof or major home repairs. 

My husband and son are very competent and can fix a lot of things, but sometimes when something needs to be done but they don't have the time, I'd rather get someone in to do it than wait for them to be available. I am not able to do a lot of things due to hand issues. 

I don't think it's lazy (I think I saw a comment about that upthread?) to hire out work that to be done by professionals. Most of the people in our neighborhood have yard services, despite the yards being just typical suburban lots. I know some people consider it a moral issue to do everything/as much as possible themselves (I'm not talking about anyone here, I mean in the world) but I don't think it is. We do our own yard work, including mowing, but frankly I think it'd be nice to have someone come do that for us.

 

 

 

Edited September 6, 2023 by marbel

[rebcoola]

Nothing really DH can do appliances, electrical, hvac. We take care of our own lawn etc.  DH is slowly coming around to hiring out stuff more often just because of time constraints.

[Catwoman]

We hire everything out.

We have three houses and several vehicles so it's not even remotely practical to do our own landscaping, home maintenance, or auto maintenance (even if we wanted to do those things, which we don't.) We use contractors for pretty much everything we need done because dh and I don't enjoy doing home maintenance or renovation tasks, and to be honest, it's more economical to pay people to do things than it does for dh to take time away from our business to do things himself. 

My dad loved tinkering around the house and the yard and he also restored classic cars and built beautiful furniture for fun, and he taught me how to do all sorts of cool things and how to use all kinds of tools. Before he died, he was passing along those skills to my ds, so I have kept up the tradition and tried to teach as many of those things to ds as I can as sort of a tribute to my dad. Ds23 is so much like my dad, and he takes a lot of pride in fixing and building things, but he does things like that for fun and as a creative outlet, not because he has anything against hiring people to do things. 

 

[Sneezyone]

Money or time. That’s the trade off. We pay now because we have more money than time. We DIYed when we had more time than money.

[livetoread]

Dh is pretty handy, and I'm a decent assistant, so we do a lot ourselves even though we could afford to hire it out. He does simple electrical and plumbing. We installed new patio doors and will install new windows next year. He did the drywall repair after a sewer backup in our basement, but we definitely hired out the remediation beforehand, lol. He has put in floor tile and we're laying lvp right now. I do the painting, landscaping and mowing plus housework and cooking. He does the outside painting. He does simple car repairs, but we hire out the oil change, tire rotation, and anything major or puzzling with the cars. We also use a car wash. We hired roofers. 

Dh likes doing projects and will be retiring in a couple of years, so I don't see any shift in hiring out until such time as he decides it's not worth it anymore.

[Katy]

Everything dangerous (roof, HVAC, heights, high tree work).

Everything gross (most plumbing), though simple stuff like changing faucets, toilets, or replacing garbage disposals we might do. 

If it’s a long or complicated job, or a bunch of little jobs I usually get a bid from a contractor or electrician because at some point I’m either going to need to buy new tools and/or it will take me more time and as much money to DIY because I lack the tools and experience to handle stuff the fast way. Electricians usually cost less than $250 for the one hour of work I have in three projects. And they would usually take me multiple days. 

I still clean myself or assign chores to my kids. DH has been lobbying for a cleaning service for years

[Clemsondana]

At this point, we tend to pay for things that we don't know how to do or don't enjoy.  We invest large amounts of time in our garden and fruit trees, so we DIY food things that most people buy at the grocery store.  I've made gallons of marinara and tomato sauce, frozen 50 quarts of green beans, shelled peas, and am in the process of dealing with 9 bushels of apples that we've picked.  It's a significant time investment, but we like having good home-grown food and are good at fitting it around other things.  When coupled with the kids' extracurriculars, spouse's job, homeschooling, my teaching gig, and volunteer work, we'd have to make the decision to give something up to find time to start doing our own roof work or any other task that we aren't already good at.  But, spouse spent his teen years helping a family member do electrical work so he does all of that unless he doesn't have an expensive tool.  My dad did roofing as a teen, so he always did his own roofing projects but paid for electrical work and plumbing.  

Years ago when I was working in a lab there was a particular technique that was really tedious to learn and took forever to do until you got good at it.  A colleague used it all the time, and I needed to use it one time before finishing grad school  I offered a trade - I'd bake a pie in exchange for friend taking care of my samples.  Both of us put in an hour of work at something we were good at.  Had I done it myself, it probably would have taken 6 hours.  It was win-win. We take a similar approach to home projects.  We learn to do things that need to be done often or that we want to know how to do.  We pay for others, with the realization that we can make more money by doing our paying jobs well than we can save by not paying somebody and doing a job that we aren't good at ourselves.  

[prairiewindmomma]

We hire out anything particularly lethal or super messy. Generally, all roofing, two story painting, and all but simple electrical are hired out. We hire out drywall mudding and tile work (after having done that ourself) and some plumbing. We have done a ton of home remodeling ourselves and there are plenty of things in the time/money trade off that we now pay money for. 
 

—-

When we have asked about service people in the home during home purchases, what we are politely asking about is proof that work has been done. Receipts are easy demonstrations that maintenance has been kept up with, iykwim. It also goes to quality/safety on particular things also…..We’ve had to fix a lot of bad/neglected DIY things over the years.
 

 

[Forget-Me-Not]

I hired a cleaning lady back when I was still homeschooling. It was worth it to me then. When she had to quit for family reasons, my kids were old enough that I felt like it was a good time for them to learn, so we do it ourselves now. 

We hire a lawn service and pest control and most anything handy that my dad can’t/won’t do for us. We are not handy people and it stresses us out to take on projects where we aren’t sure what we are doing.  Our house is brand new, though, so there isn’t much at the moment anyway. My husband does handle snow removal in the winter.  

[KungFuPanda]

We don’t think twice about hiring someone if their hourly rate is less than DH’s. He’d rather do his work than plumbing or carpentry and even if he CAN do a good job, the professionals are faster. We don’t have maid or yard service but we’ve certainly hired tradesmen for things we could probably pull off if we took the time. 
 

It was a huge relief to hire the landscapers I work with to move our chip drop. It seemed frivolous at the time, but they did in a day what would have taken me all summer. I’m starting to think life is too short to do everything that I can do by myself. I canned tomatoes this weekend and I can’t make that math work out. The amount of work each jar represented is a little silly in retrospect. All those hours of planting and weeding and watering for a few pints of purée? I could buy a year’s supply in less than a day at the office. I’ll keep doing it because I clearly have a problem but I’m not sure I can recommend it. Yep, I’m definitely buying more jars this weekend. I can’t stop!

[sassenach]

3 hours ago, DawnM said:

We have some potential buyers who keep asking us who we use for our lawn service, our termite company, our roofing company, our pool company, our cleaning company, and our gardeners.

 

You roofed your own house?! 

[sassenach]

We hire out for a ton. Like almost everything. Neither dh nor I are all that handy and dh has injuries that are not worth aggravating to save a few dollars. We have a yard guy. Pest control isn't a huge deal here but we did hire out when there were critter in the attic and again when they were under the house. We don't fix our own cars beyond replacing a battery or headlights. We take our cars to the car wash. We hire a guy to clean our gutters and solar panels. I hired junk removers to save us a dump run. We hire out for hvac, water heater, appliance repair, electrical, plumbing, etc. 

The only thing we don't have is a house cleaner and that's not for lack of desire. 

Will we survive a zombie apocalypse? I doubt it.

[Carrie12345]

We have hired appliance repair services, siding, decking, roofing, and window replacement. I take my car out for all maintenance, Dh takes is out for some, not all. Dd does most of her own car work. Of course we have our septic pump, because where would I put it??? And we’ve paid for well work.

We know how to do lots of things, but our time only goes so far.

I used to have a groomer for my chi-mutt, but I think she fired him. I bathe him, but make dd clip his nails.

I’m considering hiring a dog walker for the shepherd. I’ve increased my delivery services. Someday (but not today) I’m going to bite the bullet and get some cleaning help.

We did almost all the work on our 16x20 pavilion with a friend. We hired the concrete out. Dh needs to get the shingles and gutters done, and some decorative touches are left. An electrician friend wants to run power to it.

The two of us built our 16x20 shed at the old house from a kit, but the pavilion has 6x6 beams, so it was a different kind of hard!

[ScoutTN]

We hire people for HVAC, major plumbing, electrical, roofing, and automotive work. Dh is handy and usually likes tries to fix appliances or do smaller projects.

We do our own cleaning and yardwork. But I would hire the cleaning out in a heartbeat if we could afford it!  

[kbutton]

2 hours ago, Sneezyone said:

Money or time. That’s the trade off. We pay now because we have more money than time. We DIYed when we had more time than money.

This is part for us. 

Things that take us a lot more time or that we make a lot more mess than a professional would we might also hire out, though we’ve definitely had family help (my dad!), and my son now has lots of skills and does a lot of things for us.

If we hire out, we try to do some parts that we can ourselves to save where we can—when we had a complete gut of our bathroom in a previous house (including plumbing and some electrical), we did the demolition work (my older son and I did it; he was maybe ten—it was a ton of fun).

My dad kind of slowed down on offering to help for a while (and he’s a day’s drive away), but once he found out what it costs to hire things out here, he quickly offered to do several things for us, lol! He’s not well-suited to slowing down, and he taught my older DS a lot while doing jobs with or for us.

1 hour ago, sassenach said:

You roofed your own house?! 

Wasn’t directed at me, but my DH and my dad roofed our old house (older DS was big enough to shovel old shingles off and saved many man hours doing so)—one story ranch. We hired out for our current house because it was two stories.

Murphy’s law dictates that the week you do it, it will be hotter than Hades and there will be more layers of shingles underneath than expected, lol!

[Lecka]

I don’t want my husband on a roof unless it’s an emergency.  
 

He put a tarp over our neighbor’s sky light when it got busted in a hail storm — okay, fine.  It needed a tarp immediately.  
 

For anything else, he does not need to be up there.  

 

I also don’t want him to do things that might aggravate his back.  
 

 

Does he agree?  It depends on how his back has been at the time.  
 

Edit:  we do hire a lot of things out.  But, my husband does a lot of the less-skilled things.  He does all the yard work, but we pay for things with trees that are more than he can do, and all the major things people are mentioning like roofs, hvac, etc.  He does what he can with plumbing — he can do minor stuff.  

Edited September 7, 2023 by Lecka

[Bambam]

We do pretty much regular stuff ourselves, yard, cleaning gutter, powerwashing driveway, fixing many things - exceptions being roof replacement + a couple of A/C repairs. 

One house many years ago we did have someone come in and install new tile, but my DH has done some carpet repair. 

But I am surprised at what services some will pay for. We have one dog-poop pickup service now going on two years. They seem to stay fairly busy. 

[Clarita]

1 hour ago, KungFuPanda said:

I canned tomatoes this weekend and I can’t make that math work out. The amount of work each jar represented is a little silly in retrospect. All those hours of planting and weeding and watering for a few pints of purée? I could buy a year’s supply in less than a day at the office. I’ll keep doing it because I clearly have a problem but I’m not sure I can recommend it. Yep, I’m definitely buying more jars this weekend. I can’t stop!

I spent two hours (not even including the gardening for the tree) to make the tiniest jar of apricot jam. So tiny that I had to supplement with store bought stuff just for the one meal.  We also make our own ice-cream. It saves no money even from a raw material standpoint.

[DawnM]

5 hours ago, sassenach said:

You roofed your own house?! 

No, it was roofed before we got here.....I meant more like, "Do you have a roofing person?"  We do not!

[Laura Corin]

Exterior window cleaning and car washing. Painting. And anything more technical than that.

Oh, and our roadside assistance includes tyre change. 

Edited September 7, 2023 by Laura Corin

[teachermom2834]

We hire out everything except cleaning and lawn maintenance. We are moving and if we end up somewhere with anything more than a small patch to mow that will be getting hired out.

It’s a combo of incompetence and laziness. We just are not handy. So we don’t know how to do things and while some things can be learned or figured out with YouTube we have spent alot of time and money and aggravation trying to do something ourselves when we could have just paid and gotten it done and on with our lives. I wish we were handy but we just aren’t. 
 

Stuff we can do but don’t want to- like the yard maintenance and painting. I used to paint everything. I would put my babies or toddlers to bed and paint the kitchen or whatever. Never again. I’m too tired. I just don’t want to. It just isn’t as easy at 50 as it was at 25 and I don’t enjoy it. 
 

We are looking at houses now and even easy projects we could do I’m looking at through the lens of hiring out. Because I just don’t want to. I’m done.

My mom was handy. Her dad was an electrician and she could fix stuff before the internet just by fiddling with it. She would always say it was easy. She sewed everything. Made all our clothes- even my wedding dress. When I would ask her to teach me she would say “it’s easy. You should be able to do it just from being around it.” Well, nope. Not even close. So some people are just handy. Everytime someone on here says some home project is super simple I think they are handy and don’t know what it is like to be missing that gene. Some of us really are challenged. 
 

But do people just have a roof guy? I guess if you lived in an extreme environment. Our home we are selling was inspected yesterday and if there is any roof issue I do not have a guy. Lol. I do have an HVAC guy because the system is new and we are on a maintenance schedule. I wish I had a plumber or electrician because those are hard to find but we don’t have regular enough issues to have a guy. I do hope to have a lawn guy at my new house! (And i’m using “guy” in general sense…happy to have a gal)

[Pawz4me]

13 minutes ago, teachermom2834 said:

It just isn’t as easy at 50 as it was at 25 and I don’t enjoy it. 

Yeah, perspective changes over time. We're 60+ with health issues. We've got plenty of spare time, but stressing ourselves just isn't worth it for most things. Much easier to pay and let a pro handle it in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the effort that it would have taken us. Sometimes we do decide to piddle around with something ourselves, but only things that interest us.

Quote

But do people just have a roof guy? I guess if you lived in an extreme environment.

I'm wondering about this, too. Who has enough roof issues to need someone in their contact list or have their business card on the fridge? We had ours redone in 2016 and other than glancing around after strong storms I don't think I've given the roof another thought since then. 

Edited September 7, 2023 by Pawz4me

[regentrude]

Yes to the issue of time. We do a lot of smaller repairs, but when we redid the floors on the main level, the professional installer worked in our house full-time for three weeks. It would have taken us a lot longer, we would have had to buy tools, and we wouldn't have done nearly as good a job as he did. We have full-time jobs and other hobby interests for our spare time. Hiring this out was a no-brainer.

[Pam in CT]

We did a lot more DIY when we had a smaller house, less money and more time.  These days we hire out unless the spirit moves us, more or less. 

 

But I'm stuck on merely-prospective buyers contacting you directly, circumventing two layers of agents and just... IDK, teasing you or something.  That is just.not.done in any state I've ever transacted real estate in (NY, NJ, CT, MA).

And aslo -- this is very tertiary to the above, but -- real infrastructure stuff like termites and roof issues and etc will come out in inspection. **That is the point of inspections.** It's extremely odd to ask how you've dealt with such issues as if your answer to the question would alleviate the concern, KWIM?

[Lecka]

My parents *do* have a roof guy because they also know him socially.  But if there’s widespread damage, they are not necessarily going to wait for him to be available, and it can be better to use someone neighbors are using so they will be in your area all at one time.  

 

He is in my step-dad’s social circle.

[wintermom]

We do/did our own gardening, landscaping and pool maintenance. We definitely hired out for roof replacement, though dh was keen to try. Fortunately he realized that it made way more sense to get others to do this and save himself the potential of falling and killing himself.

I agree with PP about how and why prospective buyers have the means to contact the OP directly. That seems very strange. Perhaps these questions are coming through the realtor, and if so I'd let her provide all the recommendations she feels like doing. That would be her job, not mine until the house is actually sold.

[Annie G]

2 hours ago, teachermom2834 said:

 

But do people just have a roof guy? 

One of the reasons we bought our current house is because our former house did indeed require a roof guy. Built in 1880, the roof was more complicated than a modern roof. Additionally, there were a lot of 100+ year old soffits that would occasionally need repairs to keep bats out of the attic (and the house!). Add that it was in a snowy climate, which could be tricky with ice dams and such, and let’s just say I am delighted that we no longer need a roof guy on the regular.  25+ years of that old house cured me of the romantic notion of living in a Victorian house on my budget. 

[livetoread]

2 hours ago, teachermom2834 said:

It’s a combo of incompetence and laziness. We just are not handy. So we don’t know how to do things and while some things can be learned or figured out with YouTube we have spent alot of time and money and aggravation trying to do something ourselves when we could have just paid and gotten it done and on with our lives. I wish we were handy but we just aren’t. 

This is me. If something ever happened to dh, I would have to hire out everything. I'm intelligent enough to learn how to do these things, but have zero desire and my brain just shuts down when I watch videos or read instructions. I so don't care. But since dh is able and willing to learn all the things, I just do what I'm told, we save money, and we're both happy.

[73349]

2 hours ago, teachermom2834 said:

But do people just have a roof guy? I guess if you lived in an extreme environment.

We do; it's the same guy who cleans the gutters (2-story house).

We have quarterly service for pest control and HVAC maintenance--both areas where preventive care in our climate is highly advisable.

Our neighbors would definitely like it better if we hired out the yard work, but alas, no.

I do the cleaning. DH fixes appliances. We outsource car stuff other than washing, but do have a device to decode error codes on the car. We outsource skilled trade stuff unless it's plumbing at a basic enough level. We don't have a pool.

[Heartstrings]

We just had this conversation this morning.   A couple of light switches are acting up and I mentioned calling the electrician, but my husband said it was easy enough for him to do.  I’ll have him get one of the boys to help so he can teach them.