DIY Renovation Advice for the Adventurous

Dear Rusk Renovations,

I know that you recommend hiring someone to do your work; you'll get a better job at a better price, blah blah blah. Yeah, well guess what? I like to do it myself. I like the risk. I like trying something I've never done before and being able to do it. It's exciting and rewarding. If I can't do it to my own house, where can I do it?

Belligerent in Your Backyard

Dear Belligerent,

You're right. The fun things in life are those that are exciting and full of risks. Running a spinning 8-inch sharpened blade through a piece of plywood is pretty exciting if you haven't done it before and pretty cool if it actually fits the bookcase you're making.

Even laying down the drop cloths and changing the color of a room you've always hated is pretty exciting when it turns out your work changes completely what the room feels like.

In my own house, I did almost all of my own electric and plumbing work while I left the carpentry and painting to people I could hire. Now, I'm a really good carpenter and painter; but the excitement for me lay in trying to figure out how I could turn on one light from two places. Financially, it probably would have been a better decision to do things the other way around and hire professional plumbers and electricians. My relationship with my wife certainly would have been better if I would have been up in bed at 11:00 rather than screaming that another of my copper water joints was leaking.

But we crave what is new, interesting, exciting. And where better to find risk than around our house where the color we're thinking of painting could be horrific, the deck we're building might collapse with all our friends on top of it dancing to "Wild Thing", and our fingers might be pureed in our new 1 1/2 horsepower router?

The human animal likes risk. It's what makes us alive and nothing can make us more risk-averse and therefore dead than owning a house and wanting to protect our investment. My book, On Time and On Budget, is the risk-averse bible. How not to screw up your life by playing it very safe, by learning what you're doing before you do it.

How much better we like to learn what we're doing as we're doing it.

So "Belligerent," grab that piece of plywood and fire up the circular saw, grab that fan deck of color and pick a winner, find a do-it-yourself book and pick yourself a deck that makes your heart sing and- Live, Damn it, Live!