Doing it ourselves: Yard Work
Hubby took a few days off of work. We have a lot going on with getting the siding and electric done on the house. We are having professionals do that. Hubby and I are doing other projects. We are having YD's graduation party at our house at the end of June so it needs to get done soon.
We had ripped out the huge bushes on the left side of the picture last year and planted plants. It was time for the other side to get done.
All of the bushes were so big that you can't even see the front porch.
Hubby took the chainsaw and cut most of the branches. He left big pieces so we could tie it up to the truck to pull it out.
I loaded all of the branches into the truck. We made 5 trips to the dump. It is free for us if it is yard waste.
Hubby and my son dug up the stumps and then pulled them out with the truck. They then loaded the huge stumps into the truck.
They racked everything over so that no one breaks an ankle. We will plant everything when the siding is finished. We had asked our neighbor's landscapers how much it would cost to have them removed. They said $600. That is a nice savings for a day and a halfs work. Onto the next project.
We are really busy with our house also. I would like to hire it all done but I just can't part with the money.
ReplyDeleteWe do what we can and pay for what we can't.
DeleteHi Mcoia and you are doing really well doing things to beautify your home. We too recognise when there is a job we cannot do DIY too and hire them out. Here in Australia it is illegal to do your own electrical work so we hire that out and had a friend who is an electrician put in more power points and fix existing ones that didn't work when we purchased the house and also put in a new TV antenna on our roof. We helped him with it so he charged us a very minimal cost saving us around $700 in parts and labour.
ReplyDeleteWell worth the cost in our opinion and we will have him out to put in our new stove and put in some new light fixtures as well to replace others that don't work.
We will however fix things that are in our capability to do such as change tap washers and fibre washers, repair leaks in mains water pipes and put in gate valves for water tanks. We by doing this would have saved around $600 in labour plus more for parts by doing this ourselves.
Another job we did was clean out our grey water system ourselves which saved us $1000 over getting the professionals in to do it for us as well.
Our next to do job is that we are saving for ceiling insulation batts and will put that in ourselves as well as clean our the ceiling cavity before we install them. With purchasing the batts ourselves we figure this will save $3696.04 over getting someone else in to install it for us.
Some things we do ourselves can and do save a lot of money but we all have to remember to work within our capabilities of things we know we have the skills to do. Some things are best left to the professionals I think.
Sewingcreations15 (Lorna)
Wow. Isn't it wonderful that we are able to do so much ourselves. It saves us a small fortune. I can't even imagine how much we have saved over the years doing things ourselves.
DeleteMcoia you are so right that doing things ourselves saves a fortune as the cost of tradespeople is getting so incredibly high here anyway.
DeleteI like to keep a track of our DIY savings as it adds a new level of accomplishment for us when we do things ourselves.
Sewingcreations15 (Lorna).