DO NOT DO IT YOURSELF – IT’S NOT FOR YOU

I hear, here and there, that some home improvement suppliers, such as Home Depot, try to sell you their merchandise by “making everything easier for you”. The idea is that you can do everything on your own by not hiring a contractor or any home improvement company. For many of the smaller jobs, this could be true. Painting walls, replacing door knobs, or installing shelves are all projects you can most likely complete yourself. However, when it reaches a level where specialized tools may be required, or other dangerous tools such as saws, we suggest you leave it to the professionals, unless you already have some experience. It might not only be dangerous using a tool without any prior experience, but also you will not get the work done as fast or as nice as a contractor. What frequently occurs is that you may actually damage the materials or surface that needs to be built or installed and you end up paying a lot more to fix it.

For instance, we had a customer that called us to snake a clogged sewer line. This is a fairly easy job, but the client decided to do it on his own by renting the tools from Home Depot and he ended up losing the sewer line cap which led to an hours-long struggle to dig it out of the sewer line. The only way to dig it out was to break the sewer line and replace some of the sewer line. As a result, instead of a job that could have cost around $100, he ended up paying over $2000 and could not use the bathroom for about 2 days.

This may be a minor issue compared to the man that decided to go and repair roof tiles. According to the video he saw on Youtube, it should be a very easy fix.