Do It Your Own Self

In recent weeks and months, I’ve made it pretty plain that I’m disappointed with new and newish houses, the people who design them, the unskilled workers who build them and the drive-by codes inspectors who bless them. Besides the problems with build quality in new houses, there’s now the problem of sinking house values, especially in neighborhoods where each house is pretty much like all the others. In a neighborhood where all the houses are clones, with a two-story lighthouse foyer, brick veneer on the front and vinyl on the sides and back, there’s no reason to shop for the best house. You can just shop for the homeowner who’s most eager to sell. But even if you find an eager seller, you could find yourself stuck in a substandard house with hidden problems. Not to be gloomy, but the builder, whose warranty says he’ll fix all the problems at the house for a year, might not be in business for another year.I think now is a good time for folks to upgrade the house they already have or buy a solid existing house that would benefit from some simple upgrades. If you have decent hand/eye skills and a three-digit IQ, if you can do middle-school math and read at the eighth-grade level, I promise that you are well ahead of most of the tradespeople who make up today’s new-construction workforce. If you can play “Wipe Out” bare-handed on a tabletop, I’d say you have at least twice the intellectual firepower and three times the motor skills of today’s average itinerant laborer.If you need more proof that you’re at least as competent as a person who builds new houses for a living, try this test: Drive up to any new housing development that you would consider living in and stop in front of a house that you think looks pretty good. Then watch the workers going in and out and ask yourself these questions: If these people were valet parkers, would I give any of them my keys? Would I let any of them walk my dog or water my plants? If your answer is no and your perceptions are correct, you should be able to do simple home-improvement work. Before you start, educate yourself. Home-improvement stores are full of useful how-to books. Amazon has an endless supply of how-to books. And a person can learn a whole lot from magazines such as Journal of Light Construction, Family Handyman, Fine Homebuilding, Old-House Journal and Old-House Interiors.I know, I know. Working on your own house can be expensive, dangerous and messy, and it can cause family discord. Few things annoy family members more than drywall and plaster dust on the floor, in the mashed potatoes and gravy and, worst of all, on the sofa and in the bed.Do-it-yourself work isn’t for everybody, but it has been very good for me. When wife Brenda and I got ready to leave the Jowers shack down in South Carolina, I spent a few hundred bucks on how-to books, tools and materials, then set to work making the place presentable. A few days after I was finished, we sold the house to the first looky-loo, pocketed a fair amount of money and moved to Nashville.Brenda and I bought our first Nashville house a few weeks after we got here. I spent the profit from the South Carolina house on tools and materials, patched and painted the walls that the previous owners had left unfinished and sold the house to the first looky-loo, without the help of a real estate agent.Soon after, Brenda and I moved to New York City, bought a third-floor co-op, lived in it for about a year, then did a little fancy interior painting and sold the co-op for a tidy profit two hours after we put it on the market. (New Yorkers sure do love their fancy interior painting.)When Brenda and I moved back to Nashville, we had earned enough funds to buy and renovate the house we now live in. The place was a run-down, falling-to-pieces dump, with two-inch-high yellow shag carpet that comprised its own ecosystem. I rented a giant Dumpster and threw about half of the contents of the house in it. Then I hired contractors to install new heat-and-air and rewire and replumb the house. Once the house was habitable, I bought quite a bit of oak and poplar lumber, a table saw, a jointer, a planer and a whole lot of clamps, glue, paint, plaster and drywall tools. I set up a workshop downstairs, and Brenda and I lived upstairs. We had no kitchen. We bought a refrigerator, cooked on a hot plate and made microwave popcorn. We had just one bathtub, downstairs. We washed ourselves and our dishes in that bathtub. The house is pretty nice now, but it still needs some work. Most likely, it’ll always need some work.Brenda and I ended up with a pretty good house and a fair bit of sweat equity because we flipped a few properties back before flipping properties was cool. Then we sank the profits into the worst house in a great established neighborhood. For folks who have the giddyup and patience to fix up a house with their own hands, the worst-house-in-a-great-neighborhood approach is the way to go. One thing I’m pretty sure about: Fixing up an existing house in a good neighborhood is going to work out better than buying a new house in a cookie-cutter neighborhood.