A few weeks ago, I talked about how there are times when it might be best to hire a professional for home projects. As much as I like to save money and do as much of it as we can ourselves, there are times with it might be best to hire it out. If you decide to hire the job out to a pro, there is still a great way you can save. Do the demo yourself!
When we renovated our home back in 2012, Kev did all the demo himself. The work started with our plan to gut and re-do the downstairs bathroom, but it evolved into half of the downstairs. Let’s just say that we live in an old house and one thing led to another. At one point, we could see from one end of the house all the way to the other. He gutted it down to the studs.
Some of the demo in that particular renovation included:
- Removing the floor and wall tile in the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms
- Pulling up the linoleum in the kitchen/dining room {to find hardwoods in the dining area}
- Removing the crumbling plaster from all the walls on the back half of the house {guest bedroom, bathroom, kitchen}
- Removing the oil chimney that was no longer needed…brick by brick!
- Pulling up old carpeting on the stairs
We paid professionals to “put it back together” since much of that work was way over our heads, but we saved a lot of money by doing the demo work ourselves {I was pregnant with Brady so I wasn’t lucky enough to help with any of it…haha!}.
Since then, Kev continues to do as much demo/manual labor himself. We’ve had a couple of trees removed recently and he always asks them to just bring the tree down. He saves us a lot of money by being willing to cut up or haul away the wood himself {although this last time, some good friends took the wood to use in their wood stove next winter}.
Doing your own demo will save you money, but it is definitely a lot of hard physical labor. But when you’re talking about big and pricey projects, the sweat might just be worth it in the end.
