How to Save Money on a DIY Project

Sarah Brumley

Sarah Brumley

So you’ve got a project that needs doing and a quote that’s higher than you expected. Should you save a little money by doing it yourself or bite the bullet and hire the professional? If you’re not quite sure then you’re in the right place. That’s exactly what were chatting about on today’s episode and I’m giving you an inside look into a massive DIY project that we just finished ourselves. Sound like something you need? Well then, let’s get started.

Links for This Episode

Podcast Episode Recommendations

Grab Your Financial Fix Up Planner Today

Here’s the deal: in order to achieve your long-term financial goals, you have to have a budget that works for you and your family. That means, getting super clear on your income, expenses, and total debt payoff amounts, so you can make any necessary changes and begin to see progress. That’s exactly what the Financial Fix Up Planner is designed to help you do. With step-by-step instructions to set up your budget, monthly challenges to keep you on your toes, menu planning resources, and space to reflect on your goals, you’ll have everything you need to pursue your dream of financial freedom. Sound like something you need? You can grab your copy today at lemonblessings.com/planner and take back control of your family finances. Once again that’s lemonblessings.com/planner for your copy of the Financial Fix Up Planner.

How to Save Money with a DIY Project

Well hey there and welcome back to another episode of the Financial Fix Up Podcast. I’m your host, Sarah Brumley, and if you’re listening to this episode in real time, then it’s back to school week for my family. Which means that we are jumping back into normal routines. My husband is back to teaching, my daughter just became a senior in high school, my 3-year-old and I are making all sorts of plans for play dates and such. And while I don’t want the warm weather to leave just yet, it is nice to have a kind of consistent schedule back in place and just be able to get back on top of things.

And, I don’t know if you have school-aged kids at home or little ones, but the back-to-school season can be a great time to get back to sticking to the budget if you fell off the wagon over the summer months. It’s also a great time to reorganize your household systems and make sure everything is running smoothly. So, knowing that, I’m linking to a few podcast episodes and resources to help you get back on track or increase your success this fall and you can find those in the show notes.

Anyways…that’s not the topic of our episode today, though. Today I want to talk specifically about how to save money with a DIY project. Because, if you’re listening to the Financial Fix Up Podcast, then you probably want to save money as you work toward achieving your version of financial freedom – don’t we all! But DIY projects can be challenge. They can get tricky and sometimes don’t end with money saved or the result desired. But that’s going to change today, because I’m going to walk us through the exact steps to take so that you can be confident that you’ll save money AND get the result you want.

And I’m going to talk about this in terms of home renovation projects because we just completed our deck this past week, but I do want to point out that this information applies to even smaller projects – including car maintenance, painting, furniture assembly, or even dying your hair by yourself.

For example, take the teenager that doesn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars to get her hair done by a professional. So instead, she takes her chance with boxed bleach but she doesn’t get the result she wants. So she tries again and again until her hair looks worse than she thought possible. When she heads to the professionals, they can help her fix it, but she’s still going to have to pay hundreds of dollars. Suddenly she’s spent more than she would have if she’d just gone to the professional to start with and she’s likely still not been able to achieve the result she wanted because of the damage she did on her own with the boxed dye. That, my friend, is a DIY project gone wrong. It didn’t save money, it didn’t produce the desired result. That’s what were trying to avoid!

Now, I told you I would talk about our deck so I’m going to do that right now, and if you want to see the before and after pictures and some progress pictures, I’ll be sharing those over on Instagram so you can find those by heading to at lemonblessings or through the link in the show notes.

But, over the month of August, Justin and I rebuilt our deck. It had become a bit of a safety issue and with the amount of outdoor living we do in the summer time and people we have over for gatherings, it was beyond time to make it happen. And it wasn’t something we’d planned to do ourselves from start. In fact, we had two quotes done and both had come in at $38,000 or more to replace the existing deck and pergola. In fact, the $38,000 quote didn’t even encompass all of what we’d wanted done. I don’t know about you, but that’s a LOT of money. More specifically, it’s a LOT of money we do not have for a deck.

So, we took on the project. And I’ll talk through the steps we took to make it all happen in a moment, but all in all we ended up with exactly what we wanted for just under $10,000. That’s a $28,000+ savings just by deciding to do it ourselves. Crazy, right?

In addition to the deck, Justin and I have done our fair share of household renovation projects over the almost ten years since we purchased our home. In all honesty, we’ve replaced pretty much everything in the house that you can’t see. All of our electric had to be replaced the first year we lived here, our sewer line to the street, a major drain pipe that went through the concrete of our living room, flooring, carpeting, painting, you name it and it’s been done. Some by us and some by the professionals. Through all of that, though, we’ve honed which projects are for us, which should be left to the professionals, and the steps to take when we are embracing a DIY project and I want to share those steps with you so that you can use them to make decisions about whether a potential DIY project will actually help you save money. Sound good? Let’s jump into them now.

Step #1: Be Honest With Your Abilities

The first step to taking on a DIY project and saving money is being honest with your abilities. In our home, we are clear about our limits. For example, I love painting and am happy to paint a room as long as I don’t have to get on a ladder. Honestly, I have this thing about heights that has just gotten much worse over the years so I don’t even try anymore. I’ve painted several of our rooms while standing on a chair or stool, but I have no inclination to get on a ladder so those rooms in our home that have vaulted ceilings – those we’ve left to the professionals knowing I will not be able to complete the project.

Seems kinda silly as I’m saying it here, but it’s true.

We’ve completed multiple flooring projects ourselves, but there are a couple that we didn’t feel comfortable doing. The first, carpet – that’s something we leave to the professionals. We also had some flooring replaced in an area of our home that was very un-level. So, hiring the professionals, although more expensive, proved to be the best choice because we know that the floor is now level AND because of that, the flooring we purchased will hold up better long-term.

Now when it came to our most recent project – our deck – Justin is a woodworker. He grew up building things with wood and is very talented when it comes to those kinds of projects. He also has worked on other decks before, so he knew what to expect going in. Couple that with several of our talented friends who were willing to come by and give us a hand, we felt confident that the result would be what we expected it to be.

Whatever project you have on your plate, if you want to save money, then it’s important to be honest with your abilities. Are you ACTUALLY skilled enough to take on the task or will it cost you more in the long-term because you don’t know what you’re doing? Definitely something to think about.

Step #2: Know Your Budget

The second step when it comes to DIY projects is to know your budget. You will not save money if you aren’t clear about how much money you can spend. I talk about this all the time when it comes to creating your general budget, sticking to a grocery budget, and so on. You have to know how much money you have so you can allocate the correct amount the the correct things.

In our case we received that quote for $38,000 and knew we couldn’t make that happen. But because we knew that we were skilled enough to do it ourselves, we started to look not only at our budget, but the required elements to make it happen – the wood, supplies, etc. We felt comfortable in the $10,000 range but we needed to make sure it was actually feasible to stick to that amount before we started the project. The last thing you want to do is get into a project and realize you don’t have enough money to complete it.

After some careful calculations and giving ourselves a little flexibility, we realized that we could easily come in around the $8,000 mark. We added between $1,500 to $2,000 to that estimate to bring us to the $10,000 mark for our budget – knowing that things would come up along the way. And yes, we ended just shy of that $10,000.

A lot of that came down to choices we made, though. We could have gone with more expensive wood, hardware, or other things and spent a lot more, but because we knew what our budget was we were able to make the best decisions with the money we had. That’s how we saved money.

So make sure you know your budget.

Step #3: Know Your Time Frame

The third step in this process is to know your time frame.

One of the bathrooms we painted in our early years of marriage we did so over a typical two-day weekend. By the end of the weekend, with my arms hurting from being over my head painting for two days I honestly didn’t care anymore if the bathtub had a large splotch of paint on it, or if the walls still needed a touch up. What I really wanted to do was just hang the brightly colored shower curtain and a few towels and hope that those elements alone would cover the mistakes.

Now, in that case it really wouldn’t have been cheaper to hire someone to come in and do the job for us because it was just a small bathroom. It would, however, have been better to make plans to paint the bathroom during a time when we had more time to do it. Instead of a two-day weekend, we could have waited for a holiday weekend, or even taken time off to get the job completed in a way that wasn’t rushed and full of mistakes and frustration.

When you contemplate taking on a DIY project, make sure you are thinking through your time frame. Will you have time to not only get the project completed (and done well) but also to clean up after it? Paint cans sitting in the bathroom for weeks on end as you plan on “touch ups sometime in the near future” do not count as “project completed”. In case you were wondering.

So, lesson learned. And now when we contemplate DIY projects, we are very careful to give ourselves extra time to complete what we’ve started. In fact, we planned to spend two weeks on our deck but we actually gave ourselves a full month just in case. We started at the beginning of August knowing there would be a full month before Justin went back to school and guess what? It took 27 days to put the final pieces in place. So, plan accordingly – know your time frame.

Step #4: Price + Purchase All Supplies

Step 4 is to price and purchase all of your supplies ahead of time. So, before you even start the project, you need to know how much everything is going to cost – we kinda talked about that piece with the budgeting step – but you also need to purchase the supplies. Because prices can change, supply inventory can change, and the last thing you want to do is have a time frame for your project and be missing the things you need to complete it or spending all of your time running back to the store for more materials.

For the deck we’re talking about:

  • Wood
  • Screws
  • Tape
  • Joist Hangars
  • Fittings
  • Drill and Drill Bits
  • Hammers and Crow Bars
  • Deck Sealer
  • Paint Brushes and Rollers
  • Buckets

…among other things. The research for this took time – over two weeks and multiple trips to the hardware stores to price the items and make sure we had what we needed in the quantity we needed it in. In fact, with our deck, we made a few changes to the hardware items knowing that we wouldn’t be able to get a few pieces in the time frame we needed them. That’s okay! But how much better to know that ahead of time then to be panicking about it in the moment. You know, when you’re already hot, sweaty, and dirty from a half-day’s work.

Of course, there were still things that we had to run back to the hardware store for, but the bulk of our purchases were delivered on the start date of our project and we were able to work much more quickly and efficiently due to that careful planning ahead of time.

So, definitely price and purchase all of your items ahead of time.

Step #5: Have Fun

The final step in this process, I believe, is to have fun. Sure, building a deck or painting a room might not be your favorite choice of activities, but if you make it fun, you may come away with some great memories.

While there were some days that Justin and I worked alone on the deck, we invited different friends to come hang out and help during different times during the project. As I mentioned, there were some incredibly talented friends that brought the correct tools or offered advice and that made a world of difference. There were also some that came by to check up on us and to celebrate the progress we’d made, even if it didn’t feel like much to us at the time. We served up mimosas, ate more pizza than we ever wanted to eat in our lives, and have come away from this project with amazing memories and even stronger friendships.

Not to mention, we have a gorgeous new deck to entertain on for years to come.

So, have fun. Make those memories and save some money at the same time.

Will You Save Money With a DIY Project?

So there you have it. Our five steps to save money with a DIY project.

  • Be honest with your abilities
  • Know your budget
  • Know your time frame
  • Price and purchase all of your supplies
  • Have fun

Of course, this isn’t an exact science, but I’m sure that if you follow those steps, you’ll be well on your way to completing the next DIY project you choose to take on.

And if you’re struggling to get your budget started, pay down debt, or plan for an upcoming DIY project, don’t forget to grab your copy of the Financial Fix Up Planner. You can find it at lemonblessings.com/planner.

Whatever you decide, just know that I’m cheering you on! You’ve got this! Have an amazing day and I’ll chat with you again next time!

More
articles