DIY, Not!

Good Morning;

A week and half ago I set out to fix our shower diverter since it was letting water flow from both the shower head and the tub faucet at the same time. It was either the washer or I need a new diverter. Easy job, should take 30 minutes, an hour at most. I had changed many of them out over the years. I even got the whole collection of special wrenches.

I took off the covers and found that the unit was not brass but plastic (a few years earlier, our plumber had come out and had to replace the whole unit) (“warning, warning, Will Robinson”)

I could not figure out how to get the valve out. The wrenches had nothing to grip, so I went to Home Depot to see if someone there could help. Found the guy; he told me to just pull it out. I did that (not as easy as it sounded – red flag). Went back with the unit, purchased some O rings and tried to put it all back together (“danger, danger, Will Robinson”). It got stuck going back in and I used some force to push it in place and then decided to pull it back out and start again, except it would not come out.  I put a pair of channel locks on the stem and pulled.

Guess what happened?

I broke off the stem. Now there was no way to get the valve out that I knew and I had wasted half a day.

I had to call the plumber to fix my mess. The plumber came out and had to put a whole new unit in. The total cost was about $275.00. If I had called him first and let him do it, it would have been a service call plus a little more, maybe $100-$125.

I had a friend who decided to do his own direct mail marketing, instead of having me do it. He purchased all the equipment, software, permits (spent tens of thousands of dollars) and spent hours if not days learning to operate the equipment and software. He did a mailing each month for about a year, then he shelved it all.

About a year later, he called and asked if I wanted to buy all the equipment (trying to get back some of the money he spent). He found it was not worth his time nor did it save enough money for him to keep doing it himself.

The point of this long story is that sometimes it is not practical, nor will it save you time or money for you to do it yourself. Most of the time it is more economical, will save you time and energy to hire a specialist to do the job. Mine cost me half a day and $150, my friend a lot more. How much are you wasting?

Until next week,