The Economics Behind DIY

Winter is gone and with the spring sunny days are coming. I have a small garden in my house with some wooden furniture in it. As every one knows, wooden furniture needs a bit of maintenance from time to time and now is time for my garden furniture.

I can get two paths in order to have my garden furniture maintained. Do it myself or hire someone for doing it. I asked some budgets here and there and the cheapest I’ve found was about 800 USD. That’s a lot of money, so I decided to do it myself.

I’ve made a list of the materials I needed to sand and paint my furniture, and I went to the hardware. I bought sandpaper for my Bosch sander, wooden paint, and varnish. I spent less than 200 USD. I started this weekend doing it and I realized that not only I have saved about 600 USD, but I have something to do during this weekend and the next two or three. Probably, I save another 200 or 300 USD because I’ll stay home.

As you can see, because I decided to maintain my garden furniture myself I saved about 800 or 900 USD, and I have something funny to do at home, too. If we think deeply about this, we can realize that when we do something ourselves, rather than hire someone or buying it, we save a lot of money and we have something to do in our spare time. That is a great thing.

There are lots of things we can do ourselves and a great place to start learning it, is in the following two sites: wikiHow and Instructables. As an analog pseudo GTDer I love this how-to about how to make your own moleskine-like notebook.

Save 800USD today, 10 bucks tomorrow, 100 the next week, maybe at the end of the year you’ve saved thousands of dollars. Perhaps, in the meantime you have learned some new skills which you can use to make some extra money.

“There are two ways to increase your wealth. Increase your means or decrease your wants. The best is to do both at the same time.” – Benjamin Franklin

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