A Penny Saved

If you’ve ever had a plumbing problem, you might have an idea of where I’m coming from.  What began as a stopped up sink in my bathroom became quite the little project.

The sink has been a little slow since my Wife and I moved into our house.  It’s always drained eventually and we just haven’t worried about it.  Recently, however, it became slower and slower and then on Thursday of last week it stopped all together.

I assumed that it was merely the trap under the sink and bought a new one at Wal*Mart.  Well, long story short, it wasn’t merely the trap.  Turns out there was a major stoppage in the first elbow in the wall which required me to pull out the trap and the pipe that attached to the wall to get at it.  All in all, about 3 hours worth of work for me.  Let’s say 1.5 for a plumber.

Thinking that that was all, I relaxed.  As luck would have it, the very same afternoon, the drain from my kitchen sink and clothes washer stopped up too.  The problem there is that it backed up into the wash basin in the basement and began overflowing.  I knew that this was probably beyond even my own rather decent DIY skills.

Do you know that a plumber in North Dakota charges no less than $50 an hour?  Luckily for us, none of them had any openings until tomorrow and so I decided to rent a snake and do the dirty work myself.  Luckily again, the husband of my wife’s boss is in construction and has a snake.  He came over and helped me with the drain. Time spent on this project was about 1.5 hours.  The guy that helped has done it many times before so time for a plumber should be about the same.

Two plumbing problems solved DIY style in three days. Total time I spend doing it?  4.5 hours.  Estimated time for a plumber to do it?  3 hours.  At $52 an hour…  $156 saved just on the plumber.  And that’s only if they charge half hours instead of full hours.  And only if my estimates on how long it would have taken them is correct.

I spent a grand total of about $20 on the project and nearly $10 of that was on a pipe wrench that I get to keep and use again.  So really, the only money I spent is about $10 on the project.  Oh, and I have to go tinker with the guy’s printer on his computer and see if I can get it to work.  That’s it.  I saved well over $100 by doing it myself.

It may scare some people to try doing something like that theirselves, but really it is fairly intuitive and can be really simple.  You just have to be willing to get a little dirty and have some patience.  I had never done plumbing before, but I figured it out.  You can too.

Of course, you also need to be able to figure out when you’re about to bite off more than you can chew.  I guarantee the plumber will charge you twice if you tried to do it yourself and added extra time onto the job for him.

A good deal of money can be saved by doing these little projects yourself.  The internet can be an excellent resource for information on how to do a lot of them as well.

Next time you have a fix-it project, consider doing it yourself.  The money you save will certainly help towards you savings goals and you get a great feeling of satisfaction by doing it yourself.

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