Why We're Doing More Home Maintenance Ourselves This Year

It's a move that makes sense for us.

Recently, my husband and I were walking up to our house when we noticed that our front door was in serious need of a paint job. Our first thought was to throw some money at the problem, hire a painter, and be done with it. But when we were quoted $600 for a job that really shouldn't take more than a couple of hours, and that's including a trip to the hardware store for paint, we balked.

Instead, we tackled that paint job ourselves. And while it took away from our free time, we saved ourselves $600, since that initial quote did not include the cost of the paint itself.

And that's not the only home maintenance task we're planning to do solo. In the coming months, we plan to do our own leaf cleanup and plant our own fall flowers instead of having our landscaper do it, among other things.

All of this will mean having to find the time in our busy schedules to make these projects happen. But we're making that effort because labor has gotten almost ridiculously expensive, and we're at the point where we can no longer justify paying a fortune to have our home maintained.

A necessary shift

Had my husband and I needed our door painted two years ago or so, we probably would've been quoted $200 or less. And at that price point, hiring someone would've been worth it. But there's a big difference between paying $200 for a two-hour project and paying $600. And at this point, higher costs are driving us to do more of our upkeep ourselves.

Take our fall landscaping project. We commonly ask our landscaper to do a cleanup of our bushes and put in some fall colors. Normally, this would run us $250 or so. This year, my landscaper apologetically said that we'd probably be looking at almost double that due to the higher costs they're incurring.

As such, my husband and I have resigned ourselves to doing more maintenance this year. When prices were lower, we could justify the cost by reminding ourselves that we work hard and have earned the right to buy back some hours of downtime. And on my end, since I'm self-employed and only get paid when I actually work, I can often justify hiring contractors when it frees up time for me to plug away at my laptop and earn more.

But at this point, the prices we're looking at for maintenance are starting to exceed what I can earn in the same time the work itself will take. And so when we crunch the numbers, doing work ourselves makes more sense.

A notable amount of savings

There are a couple of home maintenance tasks my husband and I still plan to outsource this year, despite the cost. We intend, for example, to spend money on professional gutter cleaning because our gutters are very high up and we don't feel that the work is safe to do ourselves. And we plan to hire a service to winterize our sprinklers because if we mess that up, we could be looking at much higher costs to deal with frozen pipes.

But all told, we expect to save ourselves anywhere from $1,000 to $1,500 this year by doing some of our own maintenance. That's money we can pump into our savings or use for other purposes, and so it's worth putting in the time, even though finding it may be a challenge.