DIY vs. Pay a lot of money

We usually do it ourselves. So far we have not paid anybody to do anything to our house, well other than install carpet I guess, but very few people try to do that on their own.

We have a few big things that we are considering this year. The first is a new fence. This we are in desperate need of, I haven't posted pictures of our fence much, other than the one where the fence had fallen down...but you get the idea. Pretty much every side of our fence has at least a few spots where we have used t-posts and smaller pieces of wood to hold it together and keep it standing (mostly). We know this is a spendy project, it will probably be several thousand dollars to get all the supplies plus at least one weekend of coaxing friends to help us with promises of beer and food. Our original plan was to do one side of the fence every year to keep the costs down a bit, but two sides need done pronto and the third side is the one where the neighbor has already offered to go halfsies with us (yay neighbor we love you!). So I get the feeling we will probably be attempting to finish the whole fence this summer.

Last weekend we decided to have collegepro painters give us an estimate on how much it would cost to paint our house. I've been getting a hard time from family and friends about not doing it ourselves, but it has not been painted in a long time and there is much scraping, priming, and climbing of ladders involved. I'm pretty sure to do this myself it would at least take all summer and I can just see getting to the top of the ladder and then the baby crying and going back down and never getting anything done...So I had high hopes from this estimate from the collegepro painters. After walking around our house and discussing what needs done I really began to see just how much work it will be to paint our house. And then he came back with the quote, and while I feel that it is very reasonable for the amount of work being done, "reasonable" does not matter when you do not HAVE $3000. That's right $3000 to pay someone else to paint our house. If only we had that $3000 for the house painting project lying around. But we don't. And we definitely can't do both the fence and the house, and one of them needs done a little more desperately than the other...so...

It looks as if we will go another year before attempting to paint our house. I hope by then that $3000 magically appears because I am telling you people, this is one area where paying someone that much money sounds pretty darn worth it to me. I am all about doing it ourselves, but this is one area that I would really like to watch someone else do all the work...