I'm on the fence. With youtube, you can find so many things tricks and suggestions, things that professionals don't even know.
With my current home, I've brought in contractors half a dozen times. Half of those were terrible, terrible experiences. The other half saved me vast amounts of time. However, even with the solid contractors, for them it is a balance of time and money leading to some cut corners that, as the home owner, I would never cut on. But time, time is the thing I don't have enough of, else I would figure out most things.
>time is the thing I don't have enough of, else I would figure out most things.
Sure, if your time has no value, then you can learn to be professional at everything. And for many tasks the amount you'd have to pay to learn to do it far exceeds the cost of hiring someone, since they amortize their training time and tool cost over multiple clients.
Since time is finite, that's why it often pays in both time and money to hire someone.
> With youtube, you can...
Youtube and the like have led a significant number of people to assume they have skills they don't, and the effect is large enough there's subfields in econ and psych that study this effect. For example [1]
Totally agree with this, I replied similarly to the same OP. If a job is extremely complex and dangerous, but I have all the time in the world, I will find an extremely time-inefficient but safe way of doing it.
Contractors usually will cut a corner to save money and time, for example they may not tighten everything back up as well as it should be when operating on a furnace, only for you to encounter the smoke/leak next year when the machine vibration finally kicks those bolts loose.
With my current home, I've brought in contractors half a dozen times. Half of those were terrible, terrible experiences. The other half saved me vast amounts of time. However, even with the solid contractors, for them it is a balance of time and money leading to some cut corners that, as the home owner, I would never cut on. But time, time is the thing I don't have enough of, else I would figure out most things.