But painting a room or mudding drywall or hacking down a wall? These are not really that specialized, are they? Or like, they're skills that can taught at the basic level with a few minutes of instruction and oversight.
The fact that more labor has been specialized makes it harder to maintain a critical mass of unspecialized, informal labor.
If someone helps you paint, it might be months or years before you have an opportunity to really reciprocate.
And simple things have been specialized quite a bit. To do a good job painting (by modern standards) you need to prep the wall surface. It might be cracked or uneven or have bad (or out-of-style) texturing. Then you need to texture and paint, which is going to work out better with the right equipment.
Meal preparation is largely done today before the kitchen. Trimming and slicing vegetables, washing and filtering grains, cleaning and butchering animals, grinding herbs and spices, sauce and broth making, fermenting, etc., are all done already by specialists and machines. A modern dinner party at your home is closer to meeting at a restaurant for a purely social occasion than it is to traditional meal preparation.
Ah, home ownership. For so many people these days, all of those "work on the house" bonding activities they saw their parents doing are unavailable because they don't own a home and don't expect to.
I grew up with seemingly all my extended family working on their houses one way or another. I saw a lot of it. Plumbing, electrics, knocking down and building new walls, repairing floors, plastering, painting, wallpapering, carpeting, fitting windows, pouring concrete, mixing cement, gardening and remodelling the garden, erecting sheds, countless other things and that's just some basics that popped into my head.
Many of those involved a team of extended family and friends working together on a project.
As an adult I've rarely had the opportunity to do anything like that, and certainly never anywhere I lived myself, due to renting and most people I knew renting for most of it.
Even putting up a small shelf or painting a wall have been against the rules at most places. I don't own a drill because there's nothing at home to use it on. So I have neither the skills nor a friendship group that tends to develop with that sort of thing
It's not from lack of interest though. I miss it, having seen so much as a child that I've been unable to even dabble with as an adult.
It's one reason I rent a small office for work. Unlike homes, some commercial leases expect you to do things like put up wall furniture, paint as you likr, replace carpets and doors and so on. There are limits to that but not as limiting as homes in my experience.
I really do sympathize with people who can’t own a home, it’s terrible. My mortgage is 1300/month right between Baltimore and DC so it’s not like I’m out in the cut or anything. I’ve never experienced the “homes are too expensive to buy” situation, but maybe I’m just incredibly fortunate.
Post-2008 I think a big issue is down payments. Yes with 1% interest and 25 years you can turn a massive principal into reasonable payments, but how do you come up with 5% of it to get started?
It's hard to save tens of thousands of dollars unless you're lucky in your career or have a second earner dedicated just to that (and no school loans or other debt to service). Other than that you're waiting for a windfall or reliant on your parents re-mortgaging their place to give you your down payment.
I got lucky with my company's series A. But I know a lot of people whose parents helped them. And a bunch more whose parents can't— those people are still renting in their late thirties, waiting for a bus that may never come.
I mean I could do that stuff but it’s not very enjoyable for me so I’d rather just pay someone else to do it (since I can afford it). I would guess many people feel the same.
Fair, and I can afford it too. But I also have the (modest) time available to do some things myself, and YouTube is a stupendous resource for basic stuff like how to plumb a sink or snake a drain or fix a water softener seal or wire a GFCI or any number of hundreds of other things you might want to know.
It's no judgment on those who feel differently, but I find value in picking up random skills and tools and really appreciate along the way the chance to break a sweat with friends and family over these types of situations.
And sometimes it really is a major savings— I spent ~$600 last year on materials and tool rentals that saved me what likely would have been a $10k plumbing visit (broken drain pipe under a concrete floor).
