Archive for the ‘Your Project’ Category
$8 Per Hour, Really?
Sunday, March 20th, 2011
I was cruising my local Craigslist the other day and noticed a few adds by “handyman” types who were peddling their fix-it-all services for as little as $8/hour. Now, I realize that things are bad in my local area. Official unemployment figures for our area are several points higher than the State overall, which in turn is higher than the National numbers. But… $8/hour? Really?
Some readers may remember my article from a few years ago entitled He Can’t Do It For That where I point out the potential problems customers can find themselves in when hiring someone who doesn’t know the difference between running a business and working for wages. Now, some may say, there’s a big difference between hiring a contractor for a major job and hiring someone for a small job like changing a light fixture of fixing a leaky toilet. Thing is, the rules of running a business don’t care how large the ticket price is. They remain the same.
Consider, if these folks are charging you, the customer, $8/hour to work, then here in California their “take home pay” is going to roughly $4/hour (the cost of payroll runs nearly 50% of wages paid here in California, and unlike employees, the self-employed have to pay it all themselves). Out of that $4/hour they have to pay for the gas and upkeep on the truck that brought them to your house, they have to pay maintenance and upkeep on the tools, they have to keep their truck stocked with the long laundry list of consumables that you, the customer, never get charged for like plumbers putty, pipe dope, tape, screw caps, screws, nails, saw blades, sand paper, solvents, rags, hand cleaner, and so on. And we haven’t even touched the “back office” overhead that even a one-truck Johnny has in the way of forms, bookkeeping, sales and income tax, and what not. So, after all of that, what would be left?
Let’s work a simple example: I’ll pretend to be one of these folks. Let’s say I come to your house to reset your leaky toilet. You’re 10 miles away and my work truck gets 14 miles per gallon (about what a Toyota Tundra gets). I show up. The clock is running.
- Once the toilet is up I discover that the seals on the supply line are shot. You’ll need a new one.
- I head to the hardware store to get you one. I’m working for only $8/hour dude, the clock is still running.
- The hardware store is 3 miles away. That’s a 6 mile round trip.
- I get back, reset the toilet with a new wax seal, hook up your new supply line, and I’m done.
- Total time for the job? Let’s be generous (to me) and say 90 minutes. An hour and a half.
So you own me $12 for my labor. Assuming I’m smart enough to mark up the wax bowl seal and the supply line, I might make another $2 there. So my gross income on the job is $14. After the tax man takes his cut, I’ve made $7. That’s $4.67/hour! Half of minimum wage! I ran my truck 26 miles total to do your job and get back home. At 14 mpg on my truck I burned 1.9 gallons of gas. Our local gas price (as of this writing) is $4.15/gallon, so the gas I burned in my truck cost me $7.89.
So already, without even figuring in overhead costs on my truck for things like insurance, lube oil and filters, tires, and so on, I’m in the hole. And I haven’t even begun to touch the cost of tools or consumables! (How many rags did I go through in lifting that toilet, for example? Or, did I have to add screws to the closet flange because it was loose?) And we’re not touching the cost of bookkeeping and accounting.
Now, ask yourself: What if something had gone wrong? What if I had dropped the toilet tank and cracked it? I owe you a new tank, if I can find one. Probably I’d have to buy you a new toilet. A cheap toilet runs $100. I’m working at a loss; do you really think I’ve got the resources to buy you even a cheap $100 toilet, never mind the nice one I just broke that probably cost 4 times that?
Unlikely!
Or, what if I had no idea what I was doing and totally screwed up the job? I’m working for (roughly) 1/8th the rate a licensed plumber works for, after all. So the probability I’m at least partially clueless is very good.
And because I, in this fictitious example, am unlicensed and unbonded, if something does go wrong you really have no recourse against me other than small claims court. But even if you won your case – and you probably would – your chances of collecting on the judgment are very small. You didn’t hired a legitimate business working on a legitimate business model that allows a margin of profit to accumulate to cover little jobsite contingencies such as a broken toilet. You hired someone whose gross labor rate doesn’t even cover the bare costs of running the business, never mind leaving any money to take home to the family.
But that’s the very real risk you take when you hire a non-professional to work for you at or below minimum wage.
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To DIY Or Not To DIY, That Is The Question
Friday, March 4th, 2011A tweet went through my stream this morning asking the question: Should you install DIY solar panels? My immediate reply was: That depends on your technical skill level. That solicited a comment from a follower that DIY panels are not recommended. “Sealing / Optical clairity [sic.] / Serviceability / Time,” the follower said.
All are valid points. Jurisdictional restrictions not withstanding (I’ll get to those in just a second) none are reasons not to do the job yourself if – and only if – you have the technical expertise to do so. You should always buy the best quality equipment you can afford. Always. That’s true whether you’re talking about a coffee maker or solar panels.
That said, of course I’d prefer you hire me to do your installation for you. What contractor wouldn’t? But many will go further than that. They’ll go out of their way to make things sound as impossibly difficult as possible in the hope that you’ll feel like the process is so technically complex, so fraught with potential disaster, that you’ll feel like you have no choice but to either do without or hire a professional. Hopefully them. Building industry lobbyists have become absolute masters at taking advantage of our screwed up tort system to manipulate municipal fears of home owners doing DIY projects. In some jurisdictions (like San Francisco, for instance), home owners can do little more than paint their bedrooms and change light bulbs. For everything else a licensed professional must be hired. And I mean that literally!
But America was founded by do it yourselfers. You want a house? You build it. Need a new spetic system? You dig one. That independent spirit is near and dear to the American heart and it is a shame that it’s being increasingly trampled by excessive government regulation and unscrupulous marketeers who play on fear to make a sale.
Hiring a professional to do the job for you isn’t the only option. Ethical professional contractors are usually quite willing to sell consulting time. By hiring a contractor as a consultant for your do it yourself project you get all the satisfaction that comes from getting your hands dirty on your own home, but you have professional backup if and when you need it. Or, you can do as much as you can yourself, and then have the professional come in to check your work and do the parts that are too technical. There are many options, and the contractors that would be worth your hiring in the first place are also the ones that will be more than willing to sit down and discuss DIY options with you.
Just keep in mind that no contractor is likely to let you work for them on your home. In most states the laws and regulations and our lovely legal system make such an option virtually impossible. In fact, even if only providing consulting services your contractor may require you to sign a release of liability. The reason is, in some states contractors are in the same boat as doctors. If we provide you paid consulting services and something goes wrong, we can be found liable even though it was you who actually turned the screws. Finally, don’t expect the contractor to teach you how to do the job. If you don’t already posses the basic skills and technical knowledge, you really do need to just hire the contractor to do it for you. S/he’s there to check your work and consult on details and code requirements, not to teach you how to do every step.
That said, if you’re the handy sort, go ahead. Get your hands dirty. It’s the American way.
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It Was Built Under The Table…
Thursday, October 7th, 2010
I understand those country folks who simply do what they want to do with their own land. They want a house, they build one. They want a septic tank, they dig one. They want to remodel, they remodel, never bothering the hard working bureaucrats. In today’s world where the list of agencies one has to deal with, and pay, to permit a project seems endless, and where Big Brother Government seems to have intruded into every corner of our lives, I get it. I really do.
Unfortunately, this is the government we have elected and created. And while on the one hand I completely agree with Thomas Paine’s assertion that every man has a right to defy a government they believe has overstepped its authority, it must also be noted that Paine also willingly paid the price for that defiance. In fact, he got upset when another paid a fine that he flatly refused to pay! And, Paine encouraged others act likewise.
So what happens if you get caught having built a structure without the proper permits? Or, maybe you’ve bought a house that you later discover was built without permits? While the particulars vary, the theme remains the same. Beyond the fines and penalties which vary from place to place, essentially the building doesn’t exist in the minds of the agencies until it’s gone through channels. That means, the same construction documents that should have been filed when the building was built, must now be filed. And, since from the agency’s point of view this is new construction, the documents and the building must meet current code and regulatory requirements, not the codes in force when the building was illegally built. Some places are more lenient than others where things like septic systems and installed systems are concerned. But unless you’ve shown some contrition by hiring a professional to set things to right, the safest bet is to wager on the strictest enforcement possible. I know of one individual, who refuses to hire a professional, who has been trying to resolve matters for six years—and running.
Unfortunately, developing a set of construction documents for a building that has already been built is not as easy as doing it the other way around. One cannot simply assume the elements of construction like one often can with a remodel. The actual facts of the construction must be determined and then put to paper. This can requires walls to be opened up to examine header and framing sizes. Every door and window must be measured and cataloged. Wiring must be examined for sizing, proper circuit construction, and grounding. Plumbing and HVAC must be examined, the foundation examined, the lot must be mapped, the septic must be found, sized, and mapped; soils must be tested . . . The list is very long. And since everything is installed, it takes time.
Then, after all the measurements and tests have been performed, all the required changes must be determined and submitted along with the ‘as built’ plans, to show what must be completed to bring the property up to current code before an official certificate of occupancy can be issued. And you can be sure all the regulatory inspectors will be watching every step of the way.
If this sounds daunting, it should. There is a lot of forensic work that must be done when the paper trail must be created after the fact. It may not be fair, but I suppose from the regulator’s point of view it’s all part of the punishment deserved for not being a good citizen and following the rules.
So if you find yourself in this unenviable position, consider the merits of hiring a professional to get you through it. The amount you have to pay that professional’s team to settle the matter may be considerably less than the cost of attempting to go it alone with a half a dozen very angry government agencies.
Now it’s your turn: Do you think the fees and penalties and sometimes outright punishment local governments met out to those who skirt the rules are fair, or foul?
How Much Green Is Too Green?
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010So, you spend $140,000 on a deep energy renovation (DER) and, after a few years of doing the calculations, discover that you’re saving $2,000 a year on energy costs. Was that a good investment? This was a scenerio posed in the November 2010 issue (#214) of Fine Home Building. It begs the question, just how green is green enough, and what metrics should we be using to decide? When I posed that question as a discussion topic to a young contractor, he pooh-poohed the question as too easy and quipped: That’s up to the individual.
Truly. But that doesn’t mean “the individual” has the knowledge and expertise to make informed decisions.
Some time before I started this website I was called out to a lovely house that a couple had just purchased. It was a sprawling ranch style home built shortly after the end of the War. But whom-ever designed it was obviously not from Earth, since they thought the afternoon sun in the northern hemisphere was to be found in the Northeast. That’s where the sun room was located. It was a lovely sunken room with some of the biggest plate glass windows you ever saw set in redwood posts, two sets of hand made double doors also set with thick plate glass, and a natural stone floor that had been polished smooth. There were two double wide entrances to this lovely room. One from the formal living room and the other from the kitchen.
The lady of the house called me because, even though her new home sat on top of a sunny hill, her heating bill was $500 a month. And that was in the summer time! In the winter it topped $1,000. She and her husband had already dumped over $20,000 into a new kitchen before even moving into the house and, after reading about double pained windows and the efficacy of insulation were afraid they were going to have to do a very expensive DER, a message three other contractors had confirmed. Something they just couldn’t afford.
After a quick walk around, snooping here and there, I put the brakes on the whole DER idea. There were just too many other problems that needed to be addressed first, before ripping off siding, tearing into walls, and making that oh-so-fun walk down window lane at the hardware store.
That sun room was high on my hit list. It didn’t take thermal imaging to realize that it was a major heat sink—or, more accurately, cold sink. Being in the Northeast, it was cold even in the heat of summer—which was when I inspected the house. There was probably a ton of plate glass in that room, and you could see daylight under the thresholds of the double doors. In fact, you could see daylight under all the outer doors except the main entrance, which had obviously been changed. The furnace was original equipment. When it was installed, natural gas probably cost a half-cent per cubic foot. And of course, there was no insulation anywhere.
After letting the homeowner wind down while I inspected things, I sat her down with a pencil and paper and had her make out a list:
- Weather seal all the external doors and repair the thresholds and door sweeps as necessary.
- Install insulated curtains around the sun room. (A trick I learned from my mom who had a similar problem with big old plate glass windows.) In the winter time, close the living room and dining room doors to the sun room. In fact, weather seal them too, to help create a more complete barrier.
- Insulate the attic.
- Pitch that old furnace out into the street and replace it with a new Energy Star model. And make sure the HVAC contractor re-seals and insulates all the duct work. If they find duct work that’s bad, replace it. In fact, I sent them to my preferred HVAC trade contractor because I knew he’d treat them fairly and do a good job.
I made no money on that job. The husband of the house was rather handy, so everything but the new furnace was well within his ability. Nor do I know exactly how much they ended up spending. My estimate was less than $10,000. I did learn that the work reduced their energy bills by about 68%, and the cost of the work was paid off in energy savings in less than two years.
If you’ve been reading along here for awhile, you might remember that one of the first articles I posted was about life cycle costing. In that article I talked about something called Q*: The optimal point where energy savings and the cost of the work to achieve those savings, plus the maintenance cost over the long haul (the life cycle cost, or LLC), meet. Q* is, therefore, an economic calculation that may not serve the interests of those whose primary goal is not maximizing economic efficiency, but rather environmental impact. But for those who are seeking maximum impact for their dollars, Q* is absolutely critical, if very hard for a layman (and even many contractors) to compute.
Moving from the far left edge of the graph above to as close to Q* as I could get without breaking their budget was my (informal) goal as I analyzed the house and provided guidance to this particular family. Did we reach Q*? I certainly moved the needle, but I doubt we got very close. To be honest, I didn’t do the math. I didn’t have the actual numbers with which to do the calculations even had I wanted to. But I think I came closer, if on the left side of the graph, than the over-kill in the first example did on the right side of the graph. Even adjusting for inflation, the folks who dumped $140,000 into their DER will take 44 years get their money back.
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