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0 pointsAmezarak2d ago0 comments

You would be highly advised to learn how to do basic plumbing, electrical, and renovation tasks yourself in the US as well. The cost savings is enormous. Finding a quality contractor, in addition to being expensive, can also be very hard - there's plenty of people doing plumbing or electrical who might be licensed and everything but are grossly incompetent or never finish jobs.

A lot of stuff in the US is absurdly easy, as well. For example, in my area, pretty much all plumbing is PVC or PEX. Anyone on HN can learn very quickly how to work with this stuff and it's very cheap. There are very few repairs, for example, you could ever need to do that would cost more than having a plumber just show up and look at it - even accounting for buying tools.

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eigenrick2d ago

One added benefit of knowing how to do this stuff is even when you hire it out, you typically get much better work out of contractors for a better price. If for no other reason than you can more effectively communicate requirements and handle potential surprises/changes (which is guaranteed to happen when renovating)

jghn2d ago

Which of course is not dissimilar to the current state of using GenAI tools.

alistairSH2d ago

In my area, DC Metro, it's $200 for a plumber to show up. That's before they do any work - just the cost to schedule them.

And they don't do drywall - they'll hack a nasty, over-sized hole in the wall or ceiling to get the plumbing and leave you with a $600+ bill and needing a drywalled and painter next.

adabyron2d ago

In my experience, it's really hard to get someone good who can do a plumbing job, or electrical job, then patch the drywall & match the texture well. You need to search for a "Handyman" service for this & often you're getting a jack of all trades, expert at none. If they really are amazing, they're booked solid & no one will ever recommend them to you as they're already hard to get an appointment with.

For a lot of specialists like drywall, the really good people seem to never want to deal with small jobs. They get paid better & it's easier to do large jobs.

WarmWash2d ago

Yeah, generally if you even have a mild disposition to learning how things work and building stuff for fun (i.e. you tore open things and played with legos as a kid). You can generally crash course most home servicing work in a afternoon and very often end up with a better result than paying someone $500 or even $5000 to do it.

Especially nowadays with AI, you can really quickly consolidate what you need to know for your specific job. Though of course, trust, but verify.

bodhi_mind2d ago

Cutting pex to remove old shutoff valve and crimp on a new 1/4 turn valve took me probably 2 min and a $15 tool from Amazon.

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