DIY or DI Why?

[Lizzie]

Hello Everyone,

@Kirstie1 told me about an article she read recently regarding a person who managed to build their whole house by watching lots of Youtube videos, providing step-by-step guides to the building techniques needed. When you think about it that is pretty amazing and requires a huge amount of dedication (and confidence!). Sadly that person wasn't me, however personally, I am a huge fan of watching home improvement programmes on the television and home design shows in general. 🙂

Do you do much of the DIY around your home, are you a wizz with a hammer? Maybe you built your own home? Have you ever learnt any handy DIY tips from watching online videos to try out yourself or perhaps like me you are a fan of building programmes? 🙂

Looking forward to hearing from you. 

Lizzie

[Paul154]

Wow!

Just think the learning curve you have had being an airbnb host:

Towels - thick luxury or thin easy clean?

Linens - replaceable cheap blend or expensive supima cotton? White or dark color?

Customer interaction - respect privacy or greet continually?

Etc. etc....

You could spend years perfecting your decision making and your airbnb service.

Each decision has a price that you must translate into appropriate service level for the revenue collected.

Now, how does this knowledge translate into building/remodeling a house?

IT DOESN'T.

Remodelers are professionals with decades of irreplaceable training and experience.  The good ones can steer you away from nonprofitable projects and steer you to cheaper and better alternatives. YouTube videos do not go into these inconvenient details.

They are pretty people doing pretty things - do not be suckered.

Best of luck

[Lizzie]

Hello @Paul154,

Lovely to meet you and great to see you have replied to my topic here. 

It is interesting to hear your thoughts here on remodelling your house and that you like to get a professional in so you can leverage their experience and advise.

In general though, do you do much DYI, like putting shelves up or painting etc.?

[Paul154]

Hello LIzzie,

Thanks for your interest.

As i get older, more experienced and just overall more cranky, I find myself doing less and less diy projects.

I do like to paint and have professional experience painting so I often will paint. But  even then i am torn between doing it myself and hiring out. If I do it myself, it takes more time (and time is money) and it takes my focus away from being an airbnb host. 

I have put up shelves, but I've never been really satisfied with the quality of my work - either they're crooked and poorly secured.

I do admire people who do do diy projects and some people are very good at it. As for me, I think it's important to keep the projects small, simple and acheivable. I will not be building a house by watching youtube videos.

Peace

[Veronica9]

Hey Lizzie, great topic!

I am a host in Melbourne Australia and I love DIY!

I have a website & FB page called Host Hacks [link hidden] and I write blog posts on my DIY projects there.

I have just finished a balcony make-over which turned out really well and I'm so proud of it!  

If you want an entertaining read with great DIY hacks, make yourself a cuppa and settle down for a good laugh as you join me on my latest DIY adventures.

[Lizzie]

Glad you like the topic @Veronica9. 🙂

That is a lovely balcony, you should be very proud of it, the green makes it look like a relaxing place to spend time. I imagine as it is summer with you at the moment that you get a lot of use from it. Green also seems to be very topical colour at the moment, did you see that Pantone's colour of the year is a Greenery? 

Have you done much renovating in your listing or is this your first project?

Lizzie

[Veronica9]

Hey Lizzie, thanks for the balcony love!  

Yes, it's summertime here in Melbourne Australia and we have had some sizzling hot days in January so the balcony update was very timely and the space is now being put to good use.  Apart from enjoying it as an entertaining space, I also find I am now using it more myself on a daily basis.  I work from home so it's a great spot to retreat to take a phone call or do some heavy-duty thinking. I even wrote a mammoth blog post out there the other day.  Previously, it would have been way too hot out there in the middle of the day.

In answer to your question, I have been a life-long renovator and have left my mark on all the properties I have ever owned.  Some properties were major and costly structural renovation projects, while others were just a decorating job.
This current house is only 4 years old so there is really nothing to renovate, but I still find ways to embellish it.  I have 5 other listings on Airbnb (all apartments) and I think half the reason I love hosting so much is that I get to embellish them too!  It presents a whole other dynamic as you are decorating for other people (travellers) and having to think through their needs and the practicalities of enhancing a space that you don't live in.  Maintenance is a real issue: for instance, having live plants in that scenario is not always practical as they may be neglected.  You also want to ensure that the listing reflects its location so themeing is important.

Hey - you've just given me inspiration for another blog post:  I think I will do a Before & After article, showing the improvements I have made to the apartments.  Thanks Lizzie! 
Watch this space - I will post a link once I am done.

[Charles88]

I don't think you have watched very many of these Youtube videos.  They go into great depth and are generally by the remodeling experts you mention.  This information is provided  by these contractors so people can understand the cost of a good job and look for the details that need to be fixed. In other words, to build a more standard, competitive market.  Some are by do-it-youselfers with much knowledge and some others with less knowledge.  They are useful in many ways.

I have built two houses as general contractor myself and remodeled two others.  I am a software engineer and used to burrowing deep into areas of knowledge and used to avoiding "Not Invented Here" mindset.  The videos and books on home building and remodeling are TRULY useful in helping me make decisions on whether I will attempt something or call in someone.  They are TRULY useful in helping me vet a contractor and helping me oversee the work.  In fact these videos would have been extremely helpful when I went to build my first house.  Contractors have differing motives for what they do and reading books and watching youtube videos are a great way to get things done correctly.  I have actually helped 5 other friends build and remodel and contract their own homes by referring them to such information sources and they have great homes.

The biggest issue is people don't watch enough videos or read enough books before attempting things.  You can get away with one video if you are replacing the cabin air filter on a specific model of car, but if you are determining how deep to cut the ground for your main foundation, that requires quite a bit more and maybe figuring out where to find engineering help.  The videos are also great to learn the tech-speak of a trade.  Do they make you an expert, no.  Do they open your eyes to the level of expertise needed for a specific task, ABSOLUTELY.  My advice is to watch at least 2x or 3x more videos and read up once you know what you are looking at, then decide.

Example, during my remodel of a house near my son and his family with the intent of hosting and using ourselves, I was able to determine what I had to open up to determine the actual bearing of the floors so an engineer's time was minimized.  I was able to determine what departments at the city/county building I had to visit and what permits to pull.  I was able to determine what licensing requirements for each subcontractor was necessary.  I accomplished all of this and the cost of the remodel and quality of the work were both controlled using this information. 

Example 2, recently I decided I needed to close a passthrough between the kitchen and the dining room.  I wanted to determine if I could do it or if I should engage a drywaller.  I watched about 5 great videos on drywalling and several on patching smaller holes.  I then came upon a 5 part video by a community college teaching the trade.  All the little tricks and steps were covered.  I watched it four times over two weeks.  I then did the task myself and the results are great.  Several things I learned.  I won't be drywalling whole rooms, an expert can do this task faster than I can.  The overall costs of larger drywall projects easily support the cost of the labor.  Small ones are far faster and cheaper for me to do.  All this came out during the various videos.  

So the blanket statement of stay away and only let the experts do projects is not indictative of the value of these videos for people contracting the work and for people doing the work themselves.  Just know that one video or book is NEVER enough.  As in all things, do your research because things are never as easy as you would hope.

What I would like to see is more AirBnB hosting/traveling videos made by ABB, hosts, and guests

Best regards,
Charles

[Lizzie]

This is really interesting to hear @Charles88 and that you are a fan of learning to tackle some of the larger DIY tasks yourself.  It sounds like these have been really useful to you and to hear you have actually used this on a remodeling project. 

I like your idea about the hosting/travelling videos. Have you created many videos around this before? 

Thanks,

Lizzie

[Debbie_Jim0]

@Paul0, hi, and everyone has different space for Airbnb situations, I hear that!  We happened to have our contractor around when we were able to engage him in brain storming the situation of having our Airbnb in our home, separate and sound proof, we came up with a design for the solution and more, together!  THEN I was busy with furniture, decisions around color, yes towels and sheets dedicated to their use only, floors are hardwood so selecting good rugs that serve well throughout our little "cottage within a cottage", editing our description, whew, that took a lot of our time!  Even being busy with our normal routine, such as  planting our garden for the season before we started having guests, making sure that they had their share of a newly lockable gate by also desigining ideas w/ our builder, (he actually had completed that entire area with new paint and trim work, dimmable ceiling lighting, etc. plus created and built the wall/door with glass cube touch of a row above the normal door-height...he does create his own wood for such things, so I could never duplicate him).

  If my son could replace his stuck-car window, a BMW, via UTUBE then Best of Luck to you guys who can do such miracles!  We found that there was less to do that would have taken us ten times as long to get his work perfectly right, creating a separation we can access between bookings, and we love it!  Thanks for your input, too!  Deb 

[Helga0]

This thread made me smile, as I became a much better homeworker by hosting on airbnb. It created so much motivation 😉

What does a 50 year old lady do, when a guest floods the house, or another removes a glass sink or another hides a key in a flower pot till the wet earth destroys the lock a few weeks later? 

Call airbnb, if it's recent, get a refund, go to the homeworker store and repair. Mine can be reached by metro, they deliver and they have very instructive and detailed films about everything on their homepage. 

Lay a floor? For luck, I could already handle a saw quite well, but I would not have dared to lay a floor without the motivation and the films. I am very proud of my floor,  I count the sum of the experience, between flood, learning to lay a floor and having a new floor as a profitable event in my life. (Profit in the sense of gaining experience and beauty)

I became a great plumber over the years, the glass sink helping a lot. It's transparent, could be a salad bowl. Seems removable, right? It's round, it could be turned - yeah, you can turn it, it unscrews the drain or might brake it, if I fixed it quite well. (unscrewed a few times, broke 5 days ago.) I can change the whole drain, removing the sink, refixing it etc in less than 2 hours now. I get so convincing now, that even my sceptic mother let me change her 40 year old water taps in kitchen and bathroom. 

Electricity is more fun, I lay sockets whereever someone could need them. For chargers, a light, a fan and one more, you never know. That part, I learned during studies, no need for a film there. 

Renting and having a parrot, there is always something to paint. It seems guests and bird share the habit to fling food around. 

I like changing my home all the times, whenever I have an idea, what could be made better. Before last winter I climbed around on a ladder and insulated the ceiling in one of my two ateliers, to chase the last drafts, after finding this great material when doing the floor. This summer I climbed on the roof to fix some leaks. There was this cool material, a tape with a sticky bitumen side. No fire requested (I'd hate to climb on the roof with a gas bottle, flame thrower and a heavy roll of bitumen.) This tape is light, just stick it on. No more leak and the rest came handy, when they had a leak in the sink in my favourite bar. Got a free chocolate cream for a bit of tape. 

I like these big homeworker stores. I go there to get a curtain to protect my guest's modesty, a lightbulb, a can of silicone, stroll around a bit, get an idea, find a new tool, a new material, that allows to realise a new project. 

I have a few guests who come from time to time, sometimes after a year or several years. They always look at what has changed, since the last time. 

I try to add a picture, of my apprentice plumber. He likes construction work of all kind, but deconstruction even more so.

[Michelle-and-Clint0]

My husband and I and our 3 children built our house from the ground up out of used tires and other recycled building materials. It was quite an adventure but we have a beautiful family home to show for it. 

[Veronica9]

Hey Michelle, would love to see photos of your place!  Do you have a link?

[Lizzie]

Oo yes, @Michelle-and-Clint0 - I agree with @Veronica9, it would be lovely to hear more about your project. It is amazing to hear your whole house is made out of recycled material, were the tires hard to work with?

If you would like to share any images that would be great to see these (to add a photo, you can click on the little camera icon on your post tool bar). 🙂