This is the DIY history of the house that won’t get finished. Chapter links at bottom of the page.
Stories of the daily challenges of DIY home maintenance are in DIY projects.
Ted the Plan Checker purses his lips and stares at my plans for the Final Phase. “Who’s going to do this?”
“Uh, I am.”
”Hmmm. Well, you must be a glutton for punishment,” a comment he repeated three or four more times during his ten-minute perusal of my plans.
I’m guilty. I am a glutton for punishment.
When I tell strangers that, yes, I did put a second story on my house with the help of a small cast of characters one of the common reactions is: Do you do your own wiring (or plumbing?) These seem to be the two skills that trouble people the most.
I affirm that I do and often they say, I could never do something like that. I find myself thinking, without speaking, “Well, why not? Have you ever tried?”
My scale of do-it-yourselferism
Over the years I have developed a scale of do-it-yourselfers that looks like this:
- Do nothing yourselfers. I once worked for a public relations department headed by a vice president who asked his secretary to hire someone to change the bulb in his home porch light. Enough said.
- Mild to moderate do-it yourselfers. Someone who might paint a bedroom, build a fence, fix sidewalk cracks, replace a broken light switch, or maybe even wire an entire light circuit. Decent people.
- Extreme do-it-yourselfers. This is where Judy and I fall. We tend to not be fazed by knowing nothing about what we are getting into when we start a project. I installed every bit of electrical wiring in This House, including assembling the 200-amp service entrance mainly from knowledge gleaned from books.
- Outrageous-do-it-yourselfers. These folks are the building equivalent of 10th degree martial artists. This category would include a man I once worked with who, tired of trying to get excavating contractors to work at his remote mountain cabin site, rebuilt a crapped out tractor and backhoe, built a log lifting boom from scrap metal parts, then, to ice the DIY cake, as it were, he repainted the entire machine, including sporty orange flames on the hood. All this in his spare time.
I had an outrageous-DIY thought once in my youth when I drove a truck over the same 400 mile route night after night. I began wondering how long it would take to build a house using only the stuff that has fallen off vehicles along Interstate highways. I’d like to hear from or about anyone who has done this.
My DIY Roots
Just as Saul of Tarsus was stricken blind and became a primary promoter of Christianity, I had an aha experience about DIY brought on by my friend Steve sometime in my 20th year.
Steve had spent a chunk of his life working in his dad’s service station. I had a 48 Chevy (This was 1973.) The car had rust holes the size of my boot soles. I used to bug Steve about fixing this or that. One day, he turned on me and said, “Damn it, why don’t you learn to do something yourself.” We remained friends, but boy did he inspire me.