One thing Mrs. Wallet and I decided on when we chose to purchase our own home was that we would learn to take care of, repair, and renovate homes on our own. This would allow us to avoid labor costs, mark-up, etc, embedding some margin in our purchase through sweat equity. When we bought our home, no one would have called me a handy man, and I had none of these skills.
Which leads us to an expensive problem we ran into…
The problem
While we still had our original tenants in the garage apartment, they began complaining about the plumbing. Their toilet wasn’t draining properly, and any water run through the kitchen sink would come back up through their shower (along with other things).
Luckily (sort of), the plumbing underneath the second floor where they lived was exposed and easily accessible from the work space on the ground floor. Unfortunately, it was a hodgepodge of “custom” work that was far from up to code. This unfortunately meant that the home warranty I paid for didn’t apply, as the plumbers wouldn’t work on it.
I replaced part of the plumbing with a friend, installing a new clean out and snaking the plumbing both from the toilet itself and from down below to no avail. Following the plumbing out of the building, I determined that there was a bigger problem, regardless of whether there was more that need to be fixed inside.
Immediately after exiting the building, the 90-year-old cast iron plumbing was badly cracked and mostly fell apart upon some minor excavation around it. Realizing this job may be bigger than me and knowing I needed to figure out the true extent of the problem, I called a professional plumber to scope the situation with a camera and figure out how bad things were.
As it turned out, the plumbing had caved in just before it connected to the city. This was also after the plumbing from our house and the garage converged. The plumber told us we were lucky we found out this way, because it eventually would have backed up into our house, causing major issues.
He also told us we were unlucky, because his suggestion was that we needed to replace the entirety of our exterior plumbing. After some haggling, he came down to $7,500 as a quote for the work, including excavation, plumbing, covering it back up and patching the driveway he’d need to tear up to get all the way to the city line.
Ahh, the joys of homeownership!
The path forward
As we all know, contractors don’t always give the best quotes, and people in general are pretty terrible at budgeting time and money, so my guess was that the actual cost would be closer to $10,000. I find increasing any type of budget by at least 30% tends to be more realistic.
In either case, I called my friend Michael. Michael is a general badass and knows how to do just about everything or can figure it out. True to form, his response was something along the lines of…
Really dude? You want to pay some guy ten grand to dig a hole and replace one pipe with another one? It doesn’t take a genius!
~ Michael, Official All-Around Badass
So I started digging.
Digging
Just digging the ~200+ feet of trenches wasn’t that bad, although it was a lot of digging. Dirt isn’t much of a problem, even if you have to dig down several feet, avoid breaking anything, and tunnel under walkways and a fence.
What really made things difficult was having to tear up the driveway and excavate beneath it, at which point the pipes are buried much deeper. This is the one part I wish I’d handled differently.
In my quest to keep costs as low as humanly possible, I didn’t even bother to check how much it would cost to rent a jackhammer. In retrospect, this was probably a mistake as you can rent them quite cheaply.
Instead, I opted to buy a sledgehammer and a pry bar. While wielding a sledgehammer that’s also an axe on the other end feels pretty cool and I regularly play with steel maces, it was tough work.
To make matters worse, there was a thick layer of dirt/clay mixed with shells directly beneath the asphalt. There’s no way this could possibly sound as bad as it was.
Hitting this layer with the sledgehammer did nothing as the shells were too loose and the force was easily dispersed and absorbed by the dirt and clay. On the flip side, it may as well have been concrete as far as the shovel was concerned.
Methodological considerations
Eventually, I figured out I could use the pry bar pretty effectively on the dirt/shell layer, but it was still tough work. I was already pretty effective with the sledgehammer due to my time with the steel mace and practicing slams.
You’d think there isn’t much to how you shovel, but as time wore on my methods improved. I learned to balance the use of each side of my body better, conserve energy, and get the most bang for my buck with each go. The steel mace helped here too; gotta love gravediggers!*
It took me probably two weeks of actual work to complete all the excavation, mostly working 2-4 hours in the evening during the week and 8-16 hours total over the weekend. This wouldn’t have been possible without the support of my friends.
I had one “dig party” where people came and helped out for about four hours. Other than that our incoming tenant at the time (one of our best friends) helped on several days and was invaluable.
I completed the rest of the work on my own, and had to take a break/not get much done on a couple days towards the end due to my body simply starting to quit on me. Luckily I got a second wind and recovered from that fairly quickly.
Driving it all home
While I had hoped to complete more of the work on my own, time constraints ended up preventing that. This was going on during a time when we were traveling every weekend, and right as I finished the excavation we left for a week-long trip to the mountains.
My new tenant needed to move in by the end of our trip or he was going to have to look elsewhere. So we bit the bullet and paid the plumber to do the actual plumbing work, leaving us to cover everything back up and patch the driveway to minimize cost.
This ended up costing us $4,500. While that was still a lot of money, it’s a lot lower than $10,000! He was very helpful, working with us and getting the work done while we were out of town, which was a huge relief.
Surprisingly, covering in the holes on my own only took me an evening. I still had to do some landscaping to finish leveling, re-grass a couple areas, and patch the driveway. This was all pretty minor work, though, especially compared to all that digging and breaking up the driveway! It was a relief to be done.
The numbers
So was all this worth it? I’ve talked a lot about getting a great workout digging my ass off, but how does that translate into numbers or money, much less $100/hr?
To be conservative, I’m going to estimate I worked ten weekdays at three hours per day on average and one Saturday for twelve hours. This adds up to 42 hours total. Let’s also assume the total cost if I’d done none of the work would have been $8,750 (the midpoint between $7,500 and $10,000). Dividing $8,750 by 42 hours yields $101.19 or just over $100/hour.
Final Thoughts
By doing some work myself, I was able to save quite a bit of money, making well over my usual hourly rate at my job. Most of my friends and coworkers think I’m crazy for doing this, but I think it’s a great example of how you can save a good deal of capital by doing basic tasks yourself. It’s also a great example of how framing can shape your experience from a chore into something positive.
I also found that doing the work for myself felt much more rewarding than the amount of money necessarily called for. Even tasks that aren’t particularly enjoyable on the surface or at the time leave me feeling much more accomplished when I’ve figured them out and done them for myself than if I did them for someone else or paid someone to do them for me.
Have you saved yourself money by doing something yourself recently? Share your thoughts below!
Much Love,
(Your) Wallet
*As an aside, this is why I love unconventional/functional tools like the kettlebell and steel mace. There’s something incredibly satisfying about running into a situation in real life and actually having trained that specific movement pattern and those specific muscles. It’s sheer joy.
