That's a whole lot of generalizations. What stands out the most is that you seem to be saying the plumber's got no business making money. And, it's obvious that his fees include whatever overhead he has to deal with. What business hasn't got overhead? What's important to me is that someone state their fees clearly, and from that point on, it's up to me to decide what's worthwhile. In this case, I know there's a decent plumber (somewhere) who can do the work in X number of hours, and when it's done, I won't need to think about it. My roof's another story. That's something I'll probably replace myself, since I've done it successfully on a previous house.
Plumbers have a right to make money and people have the right to give it to them. I on the other hand will do that stuff myself and use the saved money to buy fun things like vacations or put it away for retirement.
My father did everything himself and although he made much less than everyone in our neighborhood, we always had a nicer home and had everything we needed. When something broke at night or on the weekend he was able to fix it instead of suffering through until a repairman could come. If we had a flat tire, he'd change the tire, instead of spraying a can of fix a flat into it.
I guess there are two types of people. People that will spend money and people that won't. I grew up learning to save money and only hire people to do work that I can't do myself. I see more and more people out there who can't even replace a burnt out light bulb in their car or replace a bathroom faucet.
Oh well, do what you want. I hope you have a good time at the office while I am on vacation.
My mother in law! If she needed an ambulance, she wouldn't call one unless she had a coupon. Her frugality was good at times, but not at others, and she didn't have the skills to know the difference. So....she did all her laundry with cold water and powdered detergent, with old iron pipes. They ended up so clogged that they couldn't be cleared. Overflowed, ruined all the basement carpet. Called a "handyman" to replace the pipes, because he was cheaper than a plumber. $2000 later....no need to finish the story. So much for saving money.
I can get my plumber in an hour if it is an emergency, but routine work is booked for months. He'll put us ahead of others at times but it can still be a few weeks. He won't even take calls from potential new customers.
I gave the electrician the "go-ahead" on a job two weeks ago and he just started today. Probably a three day job for him.
My HVAC guy took three weeks to quote a $7,000 job and it will be another few before he can get started And this is because he gives us some priority as we store his boat for the winter in one of our warehouses for free.
Good tradesmen are in demand and can make a good living. Anyone with the sills can have a good career with work for life. Ed
Not me, I will not list my business on SM. Why? They would send me an email with the job spec _as written by the homeowner_. I'd accept the job and pay SM the $10 they wanted. I'd call the customer and go actually look at the job. What they wrote and what they needed was no where near the same. I'd bid the job and not get it. I've found out since then mostly drunks and losers list with SM...
On Fri, 26 Aug 2005 19:54:31 GMT, User Example scribbled this interesting note:
I respectfully submit that you are the one providing the above description of "skilled" labor. I've seen the results of the labor you describe, and it isn't skilled. I've taken some of those immigrants and trained them to be skilled labor. Let me assure you their rate of pay went up as their training and experience suggested.
Anyone can swing a hammer. It takes skill and care to properly design, create a materials list, build, and finish even a relatively simple book shelf. I build my own. If I were to do it for others on a paid basis, most would choke on how much money it would require. After all Ikea is cheap. It is cheap for a reason.
If you are relatively good at carpentry, plumbing, electrical, drywall, painting, concrete work, and all manner of other skills that go into the building and maintaining of a home, I commend you. Most homeowners are completely unqualified when it comes to diagnosing and curing most of even the minor ills they will be faced with as homeowners. Hence the high demand for qualified, experienced trades people like plumbers, electricians, etc., etc., etc.
Here's a hint: When you find a good plumber who doesn't think possession of a plumbing license is also a license to steal, keep him (or her) happy. They are few and far between. Personally, I've known one. He is now retired. And he was an immigrant...
-- John Willis snipped-for-privacy@airmail.net (Remove the Primes before e-mailing me)
I guess you people are freaking idiots then if you can't fix anything yourself and you consider the dumb ass migrant works who paint your house to be skilled labor. I guess maybe I am just smarter than all of you because you sound like a bunch of whiners that can't do anything right on your own. I'd think that in a alt.home.repair newsgroup I would find people that are actually quite handy but I guess I was wrong. Unbelievable.
It's not like there's a diploma for being a carpenter. A guy decides one day to put an ad in the yellow pages and volia!, he's a carpenter.
We had some immigrant spend three days trying to finish some small area of drywall. Everytime he left big grooves and it looked like shit. The painter who said he was a good guy, hoad to go out and get another good guy to fix it.
And what makes some schmo on the street to be a carpenter? An ad.
This woman was the queen of cheap. At one point, her ancient gas oven would no longer light - it required a match. Because it was so old, she decided it was silly to put any money into fixing it. The result was that every so often, we'd go to her house and notice that her hair was singed. She was sticking her head halfway into the oven to light it because she ran out of the long wooden fireplace matches (which were a lousy idea to begin with, in terms of safety). I finally convinced her that the gas company would look at it for free (yippeee!!!), and behind the scenes, arranged for them to tell her it was illegal to operate the range any more. In fact, they said I wasn't too far from correct. They disconnected it and put an official looking seal over the pipe. :-) It took a week of cold meals for her to agree to be taken to buy a new stove. Unbelievable.
That's the LEAST outrageous of the stories I could tell you. :-)
Apparently, you've never seen any intricate finish work. I've seen some do work that would make your jaw drop, and in some cases using an assortment of hand saws. Absolute magic.
I agree with much of the (deleted) rest of your post, but take issue with some of your points here regarding the quality of DIY vs. professional work.
If you are a perfectionist and reasonably handy, then on many basic carpentry, electrical and plumbing type projects you can do a higher quality job than a professional if you do your research and are willing to take a lot longer. As you state, you may save out-of-pocket costs but you will almost definitely take longer and the true savings depends on what value you assign to your non-business hours time.
Professionals are not being paid enough for perfectionism nor do they usually bring that level of commitment to the job. I find that the "skill" in "skilled labor" has more to do with the efficiency of their labor than with the quality of the final result. Of course, if you are willing to pay unlimited sums for a job then you can mandate perfectionism though even this is not necessarily true.
For example, my mom is a perfectionist and goes with the highest quality/highest cost contractors yet is repeatedly frustrated with the lack of skill and attention to detail -- unfortunately, even the best contractors often bring in subs and unskilled labor that don't justify the premium they demand. She is now in the process of builing a standalone 1-story, 1-car garage for which she is paying $100K+ yet the carpenter brought in by the contractor has made countless mistakes, disregarding clearly speced architectual plans.
Let's see.....there was the electric can opener, reminiscent of something out of an M.C. Escher painting. She once left it on a stove burner and melted it in such a way that it leaned forward at about a 20 degree angle. Since it was originally tall enough to open a 46 oz juice can, you could still get a 16 oz can under it, even with the tilt. But, the magnet would no longer hold the can in place at that angle, so you had to palm the can from beneath while it was opened. Of course, this meant that whatever was in the can ended up all over your hand and the counter. Her only other options were
3 or 4 of those little openers intended for campers who are gluttons for punishment. We bought her a nice new electric opener which she refused to even take out of the box. "That old one's just fine, thank you." Then, she'd go for the bug spray and hose down the gap between the stove and the counter, where the effluent from tilted cans spilled and attracted every ant in the neighborhood.
New phone: She had an ancient rotary phone. It took almost a minute to dial anyone. Since she never opened the windows in the kitchen, the phone was encrusted with years' worth of grease and crud, which made the dialer thing sluggish. We figured that if she ever needed to dial 911, she'd be dead before she got past 9. So, in went a touch tone phone with big buttons. The first objection was that she didn't want to pay for touch tone service. Once we explained that the phone didn't require it, she decided it was still too fancy for her, and refused to make or receive calls until the phone was removed. That took 2 weeks, and it was paid for with OUR money. :-)
Free Government Food: She thought it was frugal to get on some sort of program which offered free "staple" food items to people in need, which she was not. Things like canned pork, with white labels that just said "Pork", and "USDA - Don't Call Us If You Don't Like This Stuff". She'd come home from wherever and usually put away the 5 lb brick of American cheese. Usually. Not always. Twice, we found shopping bags in the basement with cheese that had turned green and expanded to the point where it blew open the thick plastic wrapper. Sometimes, bags of rice crawling with maggots. We have no idea what the "pork" was, although dog food comes to mind.
And then, the problem is that you never know. It can be a crap shoot. As my current experience indicates, you can't always find a referral. I don't have a million friends, and of the dozen I've asked, nobody has needed a plumber in recent memory. But, years ago, we got very lucky when we needed to have a couple of ceilings sheetrocked. We'd found lead paint, and after collecting advice from 200 million sources, we decided the best way to deal with the badly cracked plaster ceiling was to enclose it, after installing some recessed lights. A friend recommended a guy whose work was described as "holy shit....amazing". He took forever to show up, wanted about 30% more than other estimates, but the ceilings looked like they'd poured into an upside down room. I walked in during the installation and found the guy had a half dozen little bubble levels suspended from strings somehow. I just shook my head and said "Yeah...OK". Perfect. We were happy.
I'd be surprised if I could find someone like that again. Or, maybe I might. Who knows?
All I am saying is that you will generally pay too much for someone else to do the job for you because you pay for everyone from the low paid laborer to the secretary, all the supplies, all the petty licenses, insurance, "extra costs just so the head guy can sip c*ck tails", "experience costs", etc. Call someone to do some work and you are helping to put someones kid through college. It's all business and there is nothing wrong with it if that's what you want to do. All I am saying is that you can do a lot of that work yourself and you can probably do it as well or better if you research and plan accordingly. For some people this is easy to do. For some it is hard. If it is hard, then I guess you just have to pay someone to do it. That's tough. But if you are at all handy you can figure out most of the stuff if you want. Sure, there are times it's easier to just hire someone, and sometimes I do. But that is not what I was getting at. What I was bitching and moaning about is when someone needs to replace a sink faucet or something else and people on here tell them to hire a good plumber to do it. Well, you don't need a plumber to replace a faucet unless you are an idiot. You can take the $100 you saved an go out to dinner and a movie and whatever. That's just being smart. It takes less time to do it yourself than to hire someone then wait for them to come while you have to take off work and then call them back because they put it on crooked or whatever. I am berating those that choose to hire someone. I am berating the people on here that imply that it can't be done yourself if you just take the time to try. But screw it, I am done trying to convince people they can save money if they want. Let them waste it along with the money they throw away on gas in their Ford Expedition.
Oh, we found a guy that's the real deal. He's made cabinets and a bench and table for us that's been great. But to just say that anybody that says they are a carpenter is talented and qualified is silly.
So, I say - sure, I agree with what you're saying! I'd wager most folks do as far as this - it's simple really, because you're substituting your own labor for paid labor. I think just about everyone here knows that they can save money by substituting their own labor for it.
But, then, it comes right down to what value one puts on one's own time. Especially considering that, when *I* do, say, a simple plumbing repair, I'll be spending a morning stumbling through it (BTDT), while a pro would stroll in and do it in 15 min. Now for a small plumbing job, the overhead they'd charge still makes that reasonable.
But for my upcoming kitchen remod? No way Jose, a pro will be doing that.
The painting/staining followup to that? That will be me :) The wallpapering? When I grow a third arm, I'll be taking that over from the pros.. (I've gotten a friend to help me - warning! - friends dont' always have the standards a person has.)
But here's the other reason I go with a pro when I go with a pro - EXPERIENCE. An experienced contractor has seen hundreds of jobs, can look at my job and anticipate the problems (I'll be knocking out what used to be an exterior wall for this kitchen remod, fer instance, don't want house to go splat...), KNOWS the tools, HAS the tools, KNOWS the materials, and has the experience and knack to go through the work smoothly. While I go and make my living in the meantime.
See - about your time - have you considered that that time is time that you might be spending with family and friends? Or getting a notch or two further up your career ladder? I'm not saying what you're doing is a bad use of your time
- I don't know the particulars and, like I said in another post, that you get a lot of satisfaction (evidently) and probably ENJOY doing the DIY counts in the plus-column for you. But it's not so simple as how you present it - how you present it is basically, you're putting ZERO value on your time. Then, berating US for puttng an actual $$$ value on our time.
THe other thing is - you seem to go far beyond just pointing out that contractors are making a living doing what they do (living, yes, means colleges for their kids and Expeditions should they choose). You seem to resent them for it. To me, it's a duh - OF COURSE they're putting their kids through college and having their friends over for a few drinks with the money I pay them. My firm has been doing the same for me for 28 years! Jees.
So the purchasers of the software you write should obviously be writing their own as they're paying for the business license of of your employer as well as the secretary and your benefit and fringe package and the machine and tools you're using to develop with.
I've noticed that there is a direct correlation between a poster that cuts out the identitifying information of the post that they're responding to and an ego problem. It's also discourteous.
resent, ridiculous, doesn't seem right... You're on a mission, aren't you? To fight the wrongs of the world. Unfortunately one of the wrongs you're fighting is a pretty standard state of affairs. Google keystoning and pricing. For smaller projects tripling the direct construction cost is standard operating procedure. If a contractor doesn't do that, they're cutting corners somewhere and won't be in business for very long. You don't have to like it. You don't even have to participate.
Those vegetables and fruit you have on the table are grown in your garden because their free, right? A sewing machine is really cheap. You must sew your own clothes. Big savings right there. Obviously you draw the line somewhere...unless you're living in a shack in Montana and writing diatribes against the unfairness of the world.
Done to perfection? What is this, a steak? You may feel you're paying for perfection, but you obviously aren't. "I expected they would do good work" is a rallying cry for the clueless. Your "expectations" don't matter. You need a written contract with everything spelled out. You also obviously don't know how to vet and hire a contractor. Your inability is the cause of your dissatisfaction.
The people you would want to hire probably wouldn't want to work for you. I can feel the mistrust and unrealistic expectations coming off of you in waves. I can only imagine what a contractor would feel talking to you face to face.
Until you learn a new skill or two (people skills and how to deal with contractors) you will continue to complain. It is your right to complain. Just don't expect everyone to agree with your way of doing things.
If I seem hard on you it's because you are totally out of line with your viewpoint...let me correct that - you're totally out of line with trying to foist your viewpoint on others. In your own words you berate people who don't do things themselves. What's that to you? If you had said that you feel sorry for people who don't do things for themselves because they won't know the satisfaction of fixing something, that would be one thing. Instead you write things like, "Well, you don't need a plumber to replace a faucet unless you are an idiot. You can take the $100 you saved an(d) go out to dinner and a movie and whatever. That's just being smart."
That's your definition of being smart. My brother-in-law picks up the phone for everything. His best tool is one of those little toy hammers that has the screwdriver set nested in the handle. Of course he's not in your situation. He's a real estate developer in NYC. He also knows how to talk to people and knows how to hire a contractor. I don't see anything wrong with the choices he's making for himself.
In another post you mentioned you're a software engineer and worked in the nuclear industry. Both are highly technical and there's a definite way to do things. Anything else is _wrong_. Garbage in, garbage out, right? You're input in this instance is garbage in. You're outcome will not change until you correct your input.
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