Home Imrovements:Should You DIY or Hire a Pro?

Comparing Your Costs and Contractor Costs
for Home Improvement Projects

Spring and Summer are just around the corner, real estate is starting to heat up, and people are thinking about home improvements.

Sellers are wondering what home improvement project they should take on before listing their home, while buyers are wondering how much it will cost them to bring the house they’re considering buying up to their standards.
The question arises “Should we hire someone to do it, or just do it ourselves?” We ran across a very useful tool to help you make that decision, but first consider this:

3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Dive into a DIY Project

1. What is Your Time Worth?

If a project would take you, the DIYer, 10 hours to complete a job that a professional could do for $250 you are valuing your time at $25 per hour. If you make more than $25 per hour it might make more sense to farm it out to someone else and save the stress and time.

2. Do You Know What You’re Doing?

Be honest with yourself. Have you had any experience in the project you’re about to take on? If not, you’re good intentions and efforts might end up costing you more money. As a general rule of thumb it is best to avoid any major plumbing and/or electrical work if possible.

3. Could You End up Hurting Yourself?

One or our clients, a trauma surgeon, took me aside one day while out house hunting and said, “Mark, whatever you do around the house, as much as possible stay off of ladders and roofs.” He went on to elaborate how many well-intentioned people he’s met in the Emergency Room due to accidents at home. In addition, you’ll need to ask yourself if you could hurt your home.

How to Compare Your Costs
and Contractors’ Cost

DIY Do it Yourself or Not is a fantastic tool that will show you projected costs on hundreds of home improvement projects. They give you an estimated cost and the hours it usually takes to do the job for you compared to a contractor. You will learn not only what the national average is but also what your local (St. Louis) costs and time will be. Check out the video below for the mobile view of the site:

Now that you have a better idea what your costs and time involved will be. But what about your return on investment? What percentage of the cost will you recoup?
Make sure to read our article on Remodeling Cost vs Value Report

Finding Homes for You Brings More Mobile Tools to Today’s
Home Buyers

We love technology and real estate here at Finding Homes for You. Before you leave our site download our mobile search app and what we call the new Shazam of real estate