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Chapter 1: What are the risks of DIY home improvement projects?
Recommendations can be amazing. I mean, maybe someone recommended that TV show you've been obsessed with lately. But when it comes to home projects, it's different. If you don't like a show, you might lose a few minutes. If you hire a friend of a friend of a friend to fix a leaky ceiling, you could end up with a flooded kitchen. Maybe I Know A Guy just isn't enough for your home.
That's why Thumbtack works so well. They'll match you with a top-rated local pro, and you can see photos of past work, credentials, and reviews all right in the app. For your next home project, try Thumbtack. Hire the right pro today. Oh, what did you watch a YouTube video and then try it yourself? And he said, actually, I did.
That kind of gives me a purpose personally. to be able to fix these things for our home.
So I opened up the front of the dryer and I used my hair dryer on it and a week later it broke down.
I love a home improvement video. Like, you decided to install an entire IKEA kitchen by yourself.
And we're having to deal with 210 packages, and we have to put it all together ourself.
You bought an abandoned house, and now you're renovating it? There are holes in the ceilings.
This is not the only one. But you know, I have faith that I can fix this place up.
You're building a tunnel under your home. I cut a hole in my sub-basement wall and started cutting into the rock under my house. That ambition is super impressive to me because I will absolutely call in reinforcements to change a light bulb. But it seems like the internet is telling me if you've got a screwdriver and a dream, you can get some real work done. I'm Jacqueline Hill.
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Chapter 2: How can YouTube videos help with home repairs?
Oh, wow.
Yeah. And my mother saw an article in the paper and she's like, Pammy, you could do that because you grew up with that. So I went and took the test and I went to the class and took the test and came back and I thought, well, why don't I build a business around that?
Yeah, I'm curious. You know, you have all these people calling to the show. You work with people in real life. You're a contractor and a home inspector. You see a lot of people and projects up close. Are people rolling up their sleeves more and trying to do it themselves these days? Or are people trying to, like, leave it to the professionals?
I think the people in my generation, and I was born in 1962, so you do the math. I'll just go ahead and tell you I'm 64. I think folks in my generation, we're kind of used to hiring somebody to come fix it. The problem has been sometimes who's the competent person to hire? And we have problems getting competent people to come in. But younger people roll up their sleeves and do it themselves.
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Why do you think that is? I think because they're seeing that they have permission to do that. Because when I started with my house, I've been in my home 30 years, I went out and bought a book to try to learn all the things about my house. Now, you just Google it or you go on YouTube. Like the other day, I was having problems with my toilet.
So I just went online and figured out what the problem was and fixed it myself. Young people are more apt to to ask those questions and go to social media to try to figure out how to fix something themselves. And then if they paint themselves in a corner and they can't get it fixed, then they can call in 911 and get somebody to come over there and help them out with it.
My experience has been with the younger people. They ask more questions. They're more inquisitive. And now these are the homebuyers that I work with that are buying these little cabbage patch houses. And I think some of that's economics. It's expensive to hire somebody to come in. And if you're barely getting into a house, you want to learn how to take care of that house for one thing.
And that's I'm real big on education. Let's teach them how to use the air conditioner. Let's teach them how to take care of the water heater. Let's teach them how to change the filters and to check under your counters to make sure that there's no water underneath there.
And you end up with a problem that costs you a lot of money when if you just maintained it a little bit at a time, you wouldn't have all those expenses. So I think some of it is more exposure from the internet and some of it is just economics. They just can't, they can barely afford to get in the house. So they can't really call somebody in to fix the rotten wood.
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Chapter 3: What advice does a home improvement expert offer?
I was changing out an outlet in a bedroom and it started smoking and the wires did not look so good. So I stopped, stepped away from it and hired an electrician to come in to do that for me. Because wiring behind a wall... that is old, is susceptible to damage, and can burn your house down.
So those types of things, those safety issues, I would really suggest that we not be doing those types of things.
If we want to close the skill set gap that we see with people trying to take on more DIY home projects, I'm curious where you think we should start.
Look for workshops. I know some of these big box stores will have those. If you can do something hands-on, and I will tell you this, I have people asking me all the time, Teach me how to use a power tool. So I will invite them over. A couple of years ago, I built a deck with 25 women, just women. And I taught them how to use a miter saw, and I taught them how to use a drill.
Find people maybe in your life and ask them to show you how to do things. And specifically when it comes to power tools, there are so many things that you can do if you know how the proper way to use specific tools. Get a group of people together. Ask a contractor to do a workshop with you.
It sounds like there's real community in this.
Yes. Yes, I believe home maintenance is a community project. That there's a way, and I love doing projects with people. If somebody wants to paint their house and they call me up, I'm like, I'm in. I'd love to come over because a pizza and a Coke or something and laughing. I did that when I moved into my house.
I invited a bunch of people over and I said, I will feed you if you help me paint my house. And it was awesome. We had so much fun.
Coming up, how to be your own handyman. I'm Jonquan, and this is Explain It To Me. Vladimir Serdak knows his way around an apartment. As a handyman in New York City, he estimates he's seen as many as 18,000 of them.
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Chapter 4: Are younger generations more inclined to DIY?
You need, I would say, at least two pair of, they're called channel locks, just pair of pliers. Everybody should have what's called a 5-in-1. A 5-in-1 is a little painter's tool, right? So it's got five different options of things that you can do. You can scrape the wall a little bit. You can clean your brush with it. You can clean the roller with it. And everybody needs a drill.
You need a drill. And not an electric one, a battery-operated one, because electric drills are too strong. You can break your wrist on an electric one.
Oh, wow. Okay. What are some of the basic repairs that a tenant should know if they're in an apartment?
I'll give you some of the experiences that I've had. I've had people call me that their curtains have fallen off in the middle of the night. If I could come and help them put up the curtains. I feel like that's something everybody should be able to do. It's a matter of putting in four screws into a wall to be able to have curtains and not bother your super for such a simple concept. I think...
Clogged sinks. Everybody needs a plunger. Everybody should own a plunger in their life. Learning how to shut off your own valves, right? So God forbid there is a flood in your apartment, just to know how to shut off, like your toilet is overflowing. If you just shut the water off to it, your toilet stops overflowing.
So you're not putting anybody in a panic because water does a tremendous amount of damage.
How do you do that? How do you turn the water off? I realize that probably seems like a very basic question, but where do you go to do that?
So if you look at your toilet, right? Look either to the bottom left of your toilet or the bottom right of it. There's going to be a pipe and a little braided hose that goes up towards your tank.
Oh.
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