We just moved in to a new house. We’re going to do a ton of customization at this place. It’s the first home we have that we can really treat like a forever home, so I’m going to go nuts with built ins and other projects.
My first project? Simply giving the master bedroom closet a new coat of paint. Budget? About $250 in paint, spackle, brushes, tape, etc. That’s $250 in materials alone. And all I’m doing is painting a closet.
I’m also going to spend about $6-10k outfitting my new workshop space, including the dust collection and other appurtenances I’ll build out. And I’ll use that to build a house’s worth of built ins.
But make no mistake, making stuff yourself is neither cheap nor easy. My general rule for a piece of good hardwood furniture is that it will cost about the same in materials alone that an equivalent ikea piece would cost. And I focous on materials as those are independent of tool cost.
Also if you are just learning, the cost of mistakes, buying a new piece of wood, buying cheap shitty wood to do a practice run with, tools you break, etc
And, your time. Everything takes so much more time than you might think, especially when you are inexperienced and you need to stop and think about what you are doing every couple of steps, even if just to double check yourself.
In the end? I think it’s worth it to build and fix things yourself; but if I didn’t have a lifetime of trying and learning at this point, it would certainly feel like an impossible hill to climb. If you have kids, teach them everything you can about it. Self-repair was the first victim of enshittification; if you can’t repair it yourself then you don’t really own it.
We just moved in to a new house. We’re going to do a ton of customization at this place. It’s the first home we have that we can really treat like a forever home, so I’m going to go nuts with built ins and other projects.
My first project? Simply giving the master bedroom closet a new coat of paint. Budget? About $250 in paint, spackle, brushes, tape, etc. That’s $250 in materials alone. And all I’m doing is painting a closet.
I’m also going to spend about $6-10k outfitting my new workshop space, including the dust collection and other appurtenances I’ll build out. And I’ll use that to build a house’s worth of built ins.
But make no mistake, making stuff yourself is neither cheap nor easy. My general rule for a piece of good hardwood furniture is that it will cost about the same in materials alone that an equivalent ikea piece would cost. And I focous on materials as those are independent of tool cost.
Also if you are just learning, the cost of mistakes, buying a new piece of wood, buying cheap shitty wood to do a practice run with, tools you break, etc
And, your time. Everything takes so much more time than you might think, especially when you are inexperienced and you need to stop and think about what you are doing every couple of steps, even if just to double check yourself.
In the end? I think it’s worth it to build and fix things yourself; but if I didn’t have a lifetime of trying and learning at this point, it would certainly feel like an impossible hill to climb. If you have kids, teach them everything you can about it. Self-repair was the first victim of enshittification; if you can’t repair it yourself then you don’t really own it.
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