Oof ouch owwie my entire existence.

My partner has gotten into car detailing and Luke’s to clean our hats and shoes. He’s happy with his hobbies.

My entire existence is fighting entropy to help save people money when everything breaks, and my hobbies are camping, repairing old Coleman Lanterns and riding/maintaining a 41 year old motorcycle.

Take a guess who feels fulfilled and accomplished with his hobbies more often?

I enjoy my hobbies, honestly, but there’s basically never a “done” state for this stuff, just “I can’t afford the cost/time to do this lower priority thing right now, I’ll revisit it when it starts making strange noises on the highway/actively combining fuel and fire”.

I feel personally attacked

This vastly depends on the field you are talking about.

There are absolutely things that are worth doing yourself, so that when they inevitably break you can fix them.

And there are also other things that are absolutely better bought or contracted…

In the end imo it gets down to time, money, and how many times are you going to need to maintain or replace the thing in your lifetime.

I do this at home and work. My running joke is “its about the journey, not the destination.” I’ve gotten my coworkers to believe in that approach too, so now everyone says that about a failed project. At the end of the day you probably learned something failing and that’s a win in my book.

“we didn’t do this because it was easy. we did it because we thought it was easy.”

Bought a used car recently. Rear door latch was seized inside the door. surely that’ll be an easy fix, I thought when I gave the seller my offer. after all, it’s over a decade old and an economy car, those cars aren’t too complicated yet.

one $12 handle to replace the one I cut off the door (and also the second half of it was broken anyways, so that was always going to be an expense), one pair of $30 long nose vise grips that didn’t even help me get a seized half of a screw out of the inner latch assembly (screw sheared immediately when I tried to remove it to take the assembly off the door), two broken drill bits trying to drill out that seized screw that the vise grips didn’t help with, $1.83 at the fastener store to replace the captured nut that the seized screw was stuck in after I just smashed it out with a hammer, 2c of dollar store epoxy to secure the replacement nut that was just slightly smaller but enough that it wasn’t held properly in the part, a die to chase the threads on the incredibly rusted screw holding the window actuator to the window (I actually already had that, but still, had to buy the set for a previous project like this), a lot of penetrant and scouring for the original problem part that was causing the door latch to seize, $180 for an ultrasonic cleaner to help clean that seized spring and the shaft joint (okay again I bought this for other reasons too in the past), 2c of lube I’ve had sitting around for ages, and then a few broken trim retaining clips and a slightly broken inner door panel and the door is good as new! y’know, but without paint matched door handles.

the replacement platch assembly part was quoted as $100 from the dealership, so I’ll take the $2 + cost of driving 15km that it was to fix the one I have. I wish it hadn’t taken me 8 hours to complete, though, once you account for all the figuring out how to open the door when neither inside nor outside handle worked, and take it apart, and get the broken part out, and clean the tape off the door paint that was stuck to it after I put it on to prevent rain entering the door from the open holes where the handle used to be, and then put it all back together. at least putting it back together was as easy as expected and took less than an hour going slow. all the other expenses, to be fair, were either inevitable or something I’d already bought for various reasons or will be able to use elsewhere (after all, he who dies with the most tools, wins)

the odds that my repair fails where getting a shop to do it, however, are not zero. also, the shop would likely have replaced the broken trim clips. I didn’t, because I don’t have them. so the door panel is also probably going to rattle a bit now.

to be fair, we usually learn from our mistakes and do it well the second time.

we get the 80$ part the third time.

Oh good it’s not just me

I feel personally attacked

I find that it really depends. Some contracted work mostly take specialised equipment, where the necessary skill is something you can pick up. The cost of the equipment is often (at entry level, but more than good enough for the task at hand) less than the show + a couple of hours.

You spent the whole weekend maybe. But you learned something new. Got some nice tools. And more often than not, did a better job because you didn’t rush anything.

Ah yes, the classic I can make it cheaper turning into a full side quest 😂

This trap? I know this trap - I could make it myself cheaper with $10 in parts and an hour of time, and then another trip to the hardware store…