[cute fuzzy bunny]

Just from reading the first few paragraphs, it sounds like the author isnt very familiar with or very good at DIY, so a pox on it.

This from the guy thats spent the last six weeks having his house torn apart inside and out and doing about 20% of that work myself. Except for huge projects I do almost all my own work.

If I know a contractor really, really well and I can get a deal where i'm paying for the materials at a discount and am getting the labor at cost then I'll pay a guy to do it.

Otherwise I've found that by the time you call 5 guys, have 3 of them call you back, have 2 actually show up and neither of them when they said they would, get a bid thats either overpriced or intentionally underpriced with the intention of jacking the price up later on when my house is torn up, get the guys to actually show up, eyeball them to make sure they dont cut corners or screw something up, I end up with a mediocre job I could have done myself in less time and with much less hassle.

Costwise, unless the project requires some exotic and expensive tool that I cant rent at home depot, I usually can buy the tools, do the rentals, get the materials delivered if they're big, and still have a HUGE cost savings over paying someone to do it.

In fact, I now have a garage and shed full of tools I bought to do a particular job, saved money on that, and then owned the tool for the rest of its life.

I got a real chuckle out of the author complaining about paying $60 to have three pallets of pavers delivered to their door. For what its worth, I paid the same for delivery of a pallet of 80lb bags of concrete, 140 4x4's and 600 fence boards.

But for times like these when contractors are starving and you can get guys to show up and give a very cheap deal to get work, maybe DIY on something complicated or annoying isnt that great an idea.