This week, Jamie tackles a question every homeowner faces: Should you handle home improvement projects yourself or hire a professional?

He breaks down common projects into three simple categories: green light, yellow light, and red light, based on safety, risk, and complexity. You’ll learn which tasks are generally safe for DIY enthusiasts, such as cosmetic updates and basic maintenance, and which ones, like electrical work or structural changes, are better left to licensed professionals.

#HomeImprovement #DIYProjects #HomeRenovation #DIYorPro #HomeSafety #BuildingCodes #HomeMaintenance #RenovationTips #SmartHomeowners #PropertyCare

Episode Highlights

1. Green, Yellow, Red Projects: A simple framework to decide which home improvements are safe to DIY and which require caution.
2. Know Your Limits: Why electrical, plumbing, and structural work often demand professional expertise.
3. Skill vs. Savings: How to evaluate whether doing it yourself truly saves money in the long run.
4. Safety First: Understanding building codes, long-term risks, and how to protect your home investment.

Welcome to Thoughts from the Crawl Space, a podcast where our goal as home inspection experts is to support and serve our community.

Whether you're a homeowner, home buyer, real estate agent, or investor, we believe everyone deserves solutions to their homeownership challenges and inspiration along the way. Your path to success starts here.

Welcome back to another episode of Thoughts from the Crawl Space. Thanks for joining us today. Today we're going to talk about something that might hit home, and that is do it yourself or call a professional.

Which one should you do? For those of you that listen out there and love to do projects around the house, this may be of interest to you.

For those of you that have projects around the house that need doing and you're debating whether to call somebody or do it yourself, this also might be helpful to you. So let's dive into what's safe and what isn't. I think big picture DIY is all about saving money, right?

You save the labor cost from a professional and you get the satisfaction of doing it yourself and learning something along the way. So calling a pro is about safety. It's about compliance or codes, long term damage prevention, insurance and resale implications.

You've got the proof that you had a professional do this work, right? And that's going to go a long way when you're selling your house. Home inspectors sit in the middle.

We see what happens when DIY goes right and when it goes wrong. Let's talk first about projects that we would greenlight, that you could always do it by yourself.

Cosmetic and surface level work, for example, painting and trim work. Not too much harm in doing that. Worst case, you can do. You have running paint, sloppy trim, all right, that's cosmetic.

Replacing cabinet hand hardware. Your handles, they get loose, they fall off, put them back on. You can do that yourself. You don't need to call somebody to do something like that.

What about installing shelving or curtain rods? Have you ever done that? Did it work out? Worst case, you got to redo it. Maybe the shelf's crooked.

And so again, I'm being negative, but I'm trying to demonstrate what's the worst case scenario here. All right, you got to redo it. If you mess it up, the worst outcome is usually cosmetic. It's not structural.

Unless you get mad and throw a hammer or something, that could be bad. So we would greenlight those projects. Always safe for homeowners. Here's some more basic maintenance stuff. Tasks.

For example, replacing your H Vac filter. You ever done that? By the way, if you're listening to this and you haven't done recently. Might be a good idea to go do that right now.

Cleaning your gutters. And this would be on a single story house and providing you feel safe on a ladder. So set it securely and get the job done. Here's another one.

Maybe you hadn't thought about replacing faucet aerators or shower heads.

I've noticed that the new fangled shower heads, kind of like the rain shower, those could get clogged pretty easily, especially if you get the cheaper ones. So I took ours off the other day, soaked it in white vinegar overnight, and amazing water pressure the next day.

It dissolves the solids that build up in the pores of those showerheads. And that's a task that pretty much anybody can do. Why? It's DIY friendly, minimal tools. Right. You maybe need a ladder.

You need to replace the filter or a wrench, possibly to unscrew a shower head. It's low risk if done incorrectly. Again, you don't do the ship put the shower head on quite right.

Worst case, it leaks into the shower where water goes anyhow. Right. And it's easy to undo. Correct. One thing that's crucial about this is this really is maintenance. And help can help prevent bigger issues later.

So that's why it's so important. So here's some. Those were green light and base basic maintenance tasks.

Let's talk about something where we're starting to get into a little bit more caution. All right? For example, about swapping out a light fixture.

You know, you want to get the new fangled lights, and you don't want to call an electrician at $250 an hour. Want to try it yourself? Okay. What about replacing toilets? Ever done that before? YouTube's got a lot of videos on how to do it.

And installing ceiling fans where wiring already exists. In other words, you're not running wires. There's already wire there. Maybe take down the old one, put up a new one. I did this recently.

I've done it before. It's something that's relatively easy to me. Maybe it isn't for you.

So you need to take that into consideration before you go rewiring anything, because that can lead to bigger problems. Here's a key on that. If you're touching wiring or plumbing connections, know when to stop. Know what your strength is.

Know what you feel comfortable with and know when to stop. And don't let your ego get in the way and cause a bigger problem. Now, what's the worst case scenario? Dealing with wiring or plumbing?

Well, That's a lot bigger than if you are replacing a furnace filter or painting trim. So that essentially is your guideline on what to do and what not to do. What's the worst case scenario here?

Now, granted, the more you go up in risk, the more you potentially save if you do it yourself. But that doesn't mean it's going to turn out well. Well, we've talked about green lights. Now let's talk a little more about yellow lights.

You know what yellow light means on a, on the road? It means either speed up and get through or, just kidding, it means slow down and get ready for red. Right.

Well, in this case, these are at least some caution. So some examples, replacing a P trap under your sink, most likely potentially under a shower. Fixing a running toilet.

Have you ever taken the guts out of the tank and replaced them or adjusted it so that it works? Right. Replacing a shutoff valve. That could involve turning water off to the whole house, putting everything back together and hoping it doesn't leak.

So what's the risk factor here for replacing a P trap, fixing a running toilet, and replacing a shutoff valve? Those are all plumbing related. Plumbers aren't cheap. Plumbers are probably 250 to 350 an hour to come out and do smaller tasks.

So what's your risk factor? Well, small leaks can become big problems behind walls. Water damage is one of the most common inspection findings.

And just to be honest, we see more damage from slow leaks than floods. And so you put something back together or you adjust a drain, you want to make sure that does not leak.

A small drip over many days creates big problems. So that's why this is kind of a yellow light project. If you have the skill, if you have the tools, you've done it before.

It's a good project, go for it. But if you haven't, that might be best left to the professionals. Same with minor electrical work. Minor being?

Replacing outlets or switches, installing smart thermostats. Why caution matters here? Well, improper wiring is an obvious fire risk. If you don't know what to touch and what not to touch, you could get shocked.

And homeowners often skip grounding or they overload circuits. I talked in a previous podcast about dimmer switches connected to 16 lights in a basement.

And most of the time they're not rated for that many lights. So what if you overload a circuit? What is that going to do? Do you have a permit to do this? Do you need a permit to do this?

And when you're done, do you get it inspected? Those things go a long way toward a potential home buyer being satisfied with the quality of the work in the basement, even if it looks good.

So those kind of things you can do if you feel comfortable doing, if you've done them before. If you haven't, I would say save the money and hire a professional.

Here's a little, little tip is that electricity does not giving, does not give warning signs. When it fails, it fails big. Right. What's the warning sign for electrical problem? Usually a fire.

So you're getting in from yellow almost to red at that point, especially if you don't know what you're doing. Another yellow kind of work, yellow light project would be deck repairs. Deck repairs can range from footers to deck decking, handrails to guardrails.

All right. Some examples of things you should feel pretty comfortable doing is replacing the deck boards. Just a nice flat surface.

Take some screws or nails out, put some more boards down. Still takes some skill, but it's relatively safe and the ramifications are relatively small. If it doesn't work, work out. Right.

Tightening railings, not talking about replacing them, but just tightening them.

Put some new boards, maybe some new screws, new nails here on decks is where the do it yourself, in my opinion, should stop and you should call a professional. For anything with ledger boards, that's the board that attaches to the house, that should be bolted and properly flashed.

Footings and then any structural connections, joists, joist, hangers, all that stuff. If you don't have experience with that, that needs to be done by a professional. Especially if this deck is any amount of distance off the ground.

You don't want to mess with that kind of stuff.

You know, if your deck is essentially on the ground or maybe a couple feet, yeah, you can probably feel more confident doing some of that work rather than if it's 8ft off the ground or 10 or overlooking a cliff. And then in that case you're going to want to call a professional. Here's some things where we would consider them red light projects.

In other words, call a pro. There's no debate. The only way this would be suitable for you is if you've done this for a living and you have the skill to do this.

So number one, electrical panel. Well, here's where you're going to have to call the power company. They're going to have to kill the power and that's left to an electrician to do.

He could put it in. He makes sure all connections are the right tightness and that there's not going to be a problem.

Adding circuits in your electrical panel, same thing. High risk of electrocution if you don't know what you're doing and it's just not worth it for a few hundred dollars. Aluminum wiring remediation.

You don't have to rip aluminum wiring out of the house. You can remediate the connections on all switches and outlets. But again that needs to be done by a professional.

High fire risk if it's not done correctly. And you certainly don't want that. These are life safety issues, insurance and code compliance issues.

And one mistake now it can cause a fire down the road months later. Even you forgot about it. Another red light project would be structural changes.

Okay, for example, removing walls, cutting floor joists for plumbing and altering roof framing. Now obviously if you've done this before, that's different.

But if you're removing walls, you've been watching these DIY programs on HDTV for a while and you feel pretty confident with a sledgehammer. Not the greatest idea. What does that wall support? Is it a support wall? If you move that wall, what's going to be left in its place?

And so that's left to the professionals. Even as inspectors we got a pretty good sense of these. But when we get a question like hey, can I remove this wall?

We're going to say look, here's my opinion on it. But you need to get a professional structural guy to look at it before you go removing any thing. Same with cutting floor joists for plumbing.

A lot of plumbers could heed this advice. They ought to have somebody else alter things so they're not cutting it. You want to cut a floor joist if you can help it for anything.

And then altering roof framing. So these are some of the most expensive post sale report repairs that we see. Cut joists for plumbing or H vac see it all the time. It's a problem.

Now we got a sagging basement floor or bathroom floor and it can just be a problem. Same with roof. Another thing that it's a red light for the homeowner. In other words, I would not do it yourself.

Is major plumbing modifications, rerouting supply or drain lines, water heater replacement, especially a gas water heater and sewer line repairs. All right, who wants to dig up a sewer line? Rerouting supply or drain lines.

You're just begging for a problem if you don't put them together right, if they don't slope properly. And if you do it yourself, an inspector is going to be able to identify non professional work Pretty quickly.

And so if you don't have that experience, I would not recommend doing it. It's going to show up later and probably cost you more if everything works right while you're living there.

Another thing that would be a red light issue would be roof repairs. Examples would be replacing the flashing, repairing valleys, or a full roof replacement.

I can think of nothing worse than potentially spending thousands of dollars putting your own roof on and then have a leak in six spots and the flashing being wrong. And now you got to call a roofer. And in many cases the only fix is to start over. That would be a bad day, and we don't want that.

We don't want to have that for you. In addition to potential leaks on roofs, obviously your safety is at risk.

And many insurance companies will not warranty a roof that's been put on unprofessionally.

So you void your warranty and you think you save a few thousand dollars on putting the roof on yourself and end up you might cost yourself many more than you would if you'd done it right the first time. Couple more things to think about where you would only want to call a professional.

Any work related with natural gas or propane modifications, appliance hookups, furnace repairs. Why? Why risk it when you could potentially blow up your house, Right. Or cause health and safety problems.

Gas leaks are always silent and deadly, and you always want to hire a licensed professional. So one of the biggest jobs of a home inspector is analyzing somebody else's work, right? We don't see the backstory on it.

We don't see who did the work. We don't know if permits were pulled. We don't know any of that.

And so we have to analyze what we see based on the visual evidence that is in front of us. And so what we like to do is take a kind of a approach. What would it. How would I want to see it done? All right?

And if we see shoddy work, if we see electrical connections that are not in junction boxes, we see plumbing that's not properly sloped or properly supported, or bad connections or fittings on and on and on, we know that's probably a homeowner that did this work or a flipper that didn't have the skill set to properly do it and needs to be corrected. So those are always stories. We're looking at decks, too. Don't take a chance on your deck. Get it done. Right.

Decks are designed to hold a lot of people. And if they don't hold a lot of people and they fall that's a serious safety issue and we don't want that come up in your house.

So make sure that if you got the skill set, go ahead, save yourself some money. That's the value of growing up, learning how to do these things. And anybody can learn. But you don't want to learn the hard way.

And so I would encourage you analyze your skill set, determine what you feel comfortable with. Anything that could be for a worst case scenario would be a health and safety risk. Follow professional thanks for listening.

Have fun with those DIY projects and we'll talk to you next time back.

Thank you for listening. This week you can catch up on the latest episode of the Thoughts from the Crawl Space podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

For more information about Gold Key Inspection services, go to goldkeyinspect.com.