Thrift Week 2022, Day Four: Do It Yourself

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Ecofrugal Principle #4: Do It Yourself

When you see the phrase "do it yourself" or its abbreviation, "DIY," it usually refers to home renovation. And Brian and I are indeed big believers in this form of DIY. We're in the middle of one home project right now, painting the office (which, as a side note, is actually going much faster than our previous room renovations; we've already finished prepping the walls and painting the ceiling and all the woodwork, so if all goes well we should be able to get the paint on the walls this weekend and be moved back in by the end of the month). And over the years we've done quite a few projects of this sort, both large (like creating a new patio) and small (like building a coat rack).

But as a tenet of the ecofrugal life, "do it yourself" means much more than just home repair. The "it" in this phrase can mean any task you could theoretically hire someone else to do, such as:

• Cooking a meal at home rather than going out to eat (effectively "hiring" the chef and servers)
• Doing your own cleaning or yard work rather than hiring a service
• Upgrading the hard drive or memory on your computer
  
• Cutting your own hair (or each other's)
• Changing the oil on your car

At one point or another, Brian and I have done all these tasks on our own. But there have also been some jobs for which we unhesitatingly hired a professional, such as replacing the roof, replacing the furnace, and any auto-related job bigger than an oil change. (In fact, since we got our first 21st-century car, we don't even do our own oil changes anymore.)

So how do we decide which jobs to DIY and which to leave to the pros? In some cases, it's a question of safety and skills. If doing it ourselves could get us killed, or cause serious damage to the house or car, we usually figure it's best left to people with the proper training. 

But also, we weigh the cost against the benefit. For instance, when it came to rewiring our downstairs room, Brian probably could have done the job himself, but it would have taken him many hours of work and eaten up his weekends for a month or more. By contrast, the electrician we hired had the skills and tools to get the job done in one day. The $642 we spent, weighed against the 80 or more hours it might have taken Brian to do it on his own, was a small price to pay.

I like to think about this in terms of "hourly wage," as Amy Dacyczyn of The Tightwad Gazette (all hail the Frugal Zealot!) calls it. The idea is, when deciding which jobs to take on, think about how many hours it would take you to do and how much it would cost to hire someone to do it for you. Divide the second number by the first, and you have the "hourly wage" you could earn by doing the job yourself. Then you can decide whether it's a job you're willing to do for that wage. 

If it's something you like doing anyway just for the fun of it, the way Brian enjoys cooking and I enjoy decorating the house for the holidays, then it can be worth doing even if the hourly wage is mere pennies. But if you don't enjoy it and wouldn't earn as much at it as you could doing some other job you like more — which, in my case, could mean putting in more hours at my actual, paid job — then you might as well do that instead, and use the money you earn from it to pay someone else to do the job you don't like.

In short, like other ecofrugal principles, Do It Yourself is not an absolute dictum. If you have a job to do, you should always consider doing it yourself, just as you would consider shopping secondhand or using a reusable item in place of a disposable one. But if you do the math and it doesn't make sense, then hiring the job out is a perfectly reasonable ecofrugal decision. After all, ecofrugality is all about making the best use of resources, and that includes your time.