Hiring a Professional Contractor Vs Doing Your Own Home Repairs and Renovations

Hiring a Professional Contractor Vs Doing Your Own Home Repairs and Renovations

When faced with the need to perform repairs or renovations around the house, a person is often faced with the question: should I take this task on myself, or should I hire a contractor to do the job for me?

In such recessionary times as these, it is certainly tempting to make plans to do "fix-it" jobs on your own. However, there are some serious considerations that you should make before you determine whether or not you are in fact best-off to "do it yourself", or if you would actually be in a better position to pay for the professional experience of a Kelowna contractor.

When assessing your situation, take the following questions into consideration:

1. How much of my time will be required to make this repair? How much time will it take me to learn how to do the work, and then actually execute the task?

2. How much do I expect this repair to cost in the long run? What will the cost of the materials and the equipment rentals be? How much extra will I spend on the little "incidentals" that will have me running back to the hardware store again and again?

3. What is my actual skill level? Am I truly able to do this job, or am I being a little hopeful/optimistic?

4. Do I know how much it would cost - conversely - if I hired a professional contractor to do this work? Have a I really weighed out all of my options, or am I just assuming that a contractor will be "too expensive"?

To give the best example of a real-life situation, I will now speak of my own experience in choosing to lay ceramic tiles in my kitchen, bathroom, en-suite and foyer, as opposed to hiring a flooring specialist to come in and do it for me.

In 2008, I bought my first house in Kelowna, BC. Having been built in 1987, it was a real "fixer-upper". The house had some very grungy, 22 year old lino in the aforementioned rooms, but my wife and I decided that we would be able to take care of the floors ourselves, as opposed to paying a flooring guy to come in and lay tile for us. After all, I am a somewhat handy guy --- I worked my way through University by doing some labor work in the trades, so I figured I could do something as simple as laying tile!

We went to Rona and bought $700 worth of ceramic flooring tiles. Then we spent some more money on the "little things" like grout, sealant, spacers, small tools, etc. Finally, we had to rent our tile cutter, at a price of nearly $100/day (which we ended up needing for about 3 days!). With high hopes, a group of buddies who swore to have tiling experience, and after having bought enough beer, burgers, hot dogs and pizza to feed everyone as we worked, we spent a weekend doing our floors.

In the end, we did the best job we could and we had a good time doing it, but with our inexperience, we made errors. In some rooms, the tiles are not quite aligned perfectly. Because we mixed several different batches of grout over the weekend, the grout doesn't all match in color (it was all the same brand and color of grout, but someone must have used too much water and changed the consistency on a couple of batches, so in some places our grout looks the light tan color it is supposed to, and in other spots it is a darker, "muddy" color). Worst of all, in our kitchen and main bathroom -- the high traffic areas -- something went awry and after a couple of months, tiles began popping out and cracking and the grout began to crumble out altogether.

In the end, the tiles in our en-suite and foyer look fine, but our kitchen and bathroom tiles need to be totally ripped out and redone. We ended up spending an easy $1200 tiling our floors, and spent a long weekend worth of time doing it, and now we are back to square one in 2 out of the 4 rooms we did and needing to re-do the floors, for the second time in 2 years! In retrospect, had we hired a professional Kelowna contractor to come in and do the job over a day or two, we would have paid the same or maybe slightly more, but we would not have to worry about re-doing those floors again for the time that we live in this house. Now, we will have to pay another $600 or so at least to "fix" our "do it yourself" mistakes... my wife and I agree that we'd have been financiall

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