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Household repairs


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How handy are you around the house? Do you repair things, or do you hire someone? Or do you just ditch it and buy new?

Our washer conked out and wouldn’t drain. Gave an error code about the motor not working, and the estimated cost of repair was at least $300 if I hired someone. Did some YouTube searches and found that the most likely cause was a broken sensor, because the drum would turn, it’d just stop during the drain cycle. So I ordered the replacement part for $10, took the washer apart, and fixed it. For $300 I feel like I would have just bought something new instead of repairing it.

Anyways, I still have pneumonia (fever is gone though) so I feel like I might die but totally worth it.

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We're fairly handy and Google definitely helps. My husband did networking in high school and he used to spend summers up here with his grandpa and uncle who is a contractor. I am not as handy but good at the Google. I'm also really good at buying stuff on the internet. My husband will buy the wrong part, especially if he goes in person because he will just grab something instead of looking at part numbers or whatever. I can't tell you how many shower cartridges we bought the winter before COVID hit that I had to repackage and return and finally go myself to buy the right damn part. So we make a good team. I'm procurement and work planning, and he's the manual labor.

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I'm reasonably handy, but I don't have to be because my husband is the shit. We live reasonably well for our income level because of how much money we don't have to spend on home and auto repairs. Trevor saves us thousands of dollars each year in labor charges. 

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I'm pretty useless/unmotivated to do home repairs. That said we mostly do bits an pieces ourselves. I find  plumbing is easy. For the most part. Sometimes need a second set of hands curtousy of my wife if replacing a mono block faucet or something. If it's an electrical problem we'll call someone. I'm not fucking with wiring. And if it's the boiler or gas well get a professional. If it's cosmetic we'll do it ourselves. Had to have a roofer over to repoint the chimney the other month. 

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5 hours ago, Odine said:

I'm pretty useless/unmotivated to do home repairs. That said we mostly do bits an pieces ourselves. I find  plumbing is easy. For the most part. Sometimes need a second set of hands curtousy of my wife if replacing a mono block faucet or something. If it's an electrical problem we'll call someone. I'm not fucking with wiring. And if it's the boiler or gas well get a professional. If it's cosmetic we'll do it ourselves. Had to have a roofer over to repoint the chimney the other month. 

I’m the exact opposite- electrical stuff is fine, but I won’t mess with most plumbing. Handling insurance claims, I’ve seen too much extensive water damage. Electricity can mess stuff up too, but in a modern home it’s likely to just trip a breaker rather than burn your house down, but water has no breaker system. 
 

But that all sounds pretty handy to me. Not sure why you feel useless if you can do that kind of stuff.

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I mean, I won't touch stuff around the water boiler. But if it's taking a pipe apart to clear a block or replace a tap that's fine. Just turn mains off and jobs a goodun 

I'm not handy in the sense that I'll let a problem go on for 6 weeks before I do anything about it. Often my wife is the first to get the spanner or the drill out lol. She's more handy than me to be fair. 

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I am not afraid to do some work. I've done some repairs around the condo myself. I think the thing that pisses me off the most is I have to hire certain ppl to come fix my stuff because physically I can't lift it or move it on my own. Like when I had to replace the sink faucet I found I just didn't have the upper arm strength to reach up and turn two corroded wing nuts to get the old faucet off. 

Oh and there was the time I lost my temper changing the shower cartridge out and hit a pipe with my hammer and broke it.

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I can do a fair amount of stuff around the house. Whether I call someone depends on the display of the job. Like fixing a car, the party's usually aren't the problem it's the labor. I replaced our water heater, but the heat valve on our bathroom shower i couldn't have diagnosed. $400 job to get hot water flowing in the shower. $30 worth of parts. Nothing on Google told me about the heat valve.

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Yeah, water stuff I'm probably going to call a plumber. HVAC stuff I don't touch, either (which is funny because I'm essentially an HVAC engineer). I can do the math but heck if I know which part broke. My husband is pretty darn good at electrical but also knows his limits. This dumbass we bought a house from did a lot of DIY electrical and did not do it well. We may hire an electrician to redo the house at some point because the codes from 1995 are not very modern and we have barely any neutral wires anywhere required for smart home stuff. We also need a 240V installed in the garage for the F150 Lightning we are supposed to get this coming spring.

Our leaf blower broke (probably heard Jedigoat talking shit), and it's because the safety won't disengage. Probably going to have to buy a freaking new one. Cheap ass Black & Decker crap. Like we can figure out why something broke but dismantling it seems like a bad idea or maybe not even possible.

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I'm not even sure if Ford will offer to do it for us. I'm actually a little frustrated because there's been zero communication from them. But our new neighbors have a friend who specializes in installing these things for EVs, so we will likely hire him.

We also need a 240V run to our dryer, we currently have something jury-rigged that the manufacturer doesn't recommend but the dryer is 8 years old, so if we fry it, we fry it. But its been 2 months so at this point, I think we're ok.

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15 hours ago, Destiny Skywalker said:

Like we can figure out why something broke but dismantling it seems like a bad idea or maybe not even possible.

Nowadays, things are deliberately made so that they can't be taken apart, so you'll spend more money buying a new thing. When my computer speakers began sounding crackly, I looked for a way to take them apart, thinking maybe it was just a loose wire.  But, neither the speakers nor the subwoofer were designed to be got into. I couldn't even see any type of screws on them, I think the parts just snap together permanently, and you have to buy a whole new set, which is what I did.

Anyway, I live in an apartment, so I call the landlord when something needs fixing. I even have to call him to replace the lightbulbs in the ceiling fixtures, because I don't have a tall enough ladder for my 12-foot ceilings. (I'd get one, but my money has other priorities.) But I can do things like refinish furniture. I refinished the built-in curio cabinet in the living room because I got tired of the layers of ugly off-white paint on it. I'm now working on the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, which is metal and also had several layers of paint on it. I'm doing the inside white, and the outside copper.

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14 hours ago, Chalcedony said:

Nowadays, things are deliberately made so that they can't be taken apart, so you'll spend more money buying a new thing. When my computer speakers began sounding crackly, I looked for a way to take them apart, thinking maybe it was just a loose wire.  But, neither the speakers nor the subwoofer were designed to be got into. I couldn't even see any type of screws on them, I think the parts just snap together permanently, and you have to buy a whole new set, which is what I did.

I suspect this is exactly the case for our leaf blower. I can't find a screw or even a decent seam to break apart and get in there to see what is jamming the safety. So now I need a new stupid leaf blower.

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