Damn dude, we pay $30 and get a weekly visit. Honestly, I’d probably pay more since my allergies would lay me out for a full day when I mowed and edged myself.
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i wear my nice woodshop dust mask and that curbs the allergies.
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And then hose yourself down outside so you don’t bring it in the house? You animal!!!
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Lol, I have weedeated my yard once this year. My son has done it twice. I don’t feel like paying anyone to do it. I also didn’t feel like overhauling my mower as I do every beginning of the season.
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This is common everywhere, people on both sides over/under value their/others’ time, skill and experience for certain/many tasks.
I concur - $30 per week is a pittance compared to “laid up with allergies for the rest of the day.”
There was a time $30 meant a lot more to me. These days my comfort does. 
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Side note: I have a good tree guy I’ll text you his number.
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That’s why I built that big fence…
OK Mr. Moneybags…
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Pretty skewed numbers. If you believe they’re accurate, Aren’t you interested in making $180k a year fot that?
Teachers only work part of the year? Hahaha, oh man.
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Conversely, I had multiple fencing contractors quote me something to the effect of >$2000 to replace ~30’ of fence in two separate sections. I opted to replace it myself over the course of a few weekends for less than $1000 over-built exactly the way I wanted it - steel posts, 2x4 crossbars, treated lumber, all components drilled/screwed together, hilariously over-engineered gates. Professional contractors surely would have done prettier work, but they would use nails for the pickets and surely build it less sturdy.
The quotes may well have been fair and a crew could have knocked out the job working but a few hours each day on 2 days (concrete’s gotta set, natch), but the value proposition simply wasn’t there for me.
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This is why I built my own as well. One of my neighbors is a contractor and was slightly offended when I didn’t call him. Little did he know I’ve been occasionally patching up bowing boards on his fence for 2 years now. Oh and he failed to thank me as my fence is now propping his his up because his is leaning so bad. His is only 4 yrs old too…
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Many years ago, my dad advised me: when computing the value of having a service done, to determine what my hourly rate would be to do the task, estimate the (potentially non-expert) time for me to complete it, and compare that resulting cost to the cost of having it done by someone else.
I’ve found this calculus quite useful: woodworking and general home improvement projects I might only “pay” myself a buck or two an hour. Re-roofing a house in Summer (I’ve helped do three over the years) is miserable work and is closer to $100/hour. Other projects (like replacing an exterior window) I might charge a low rate because the task is interesting, but my inexperience (and worry about a less than workable outcome) leads to a large anticipated # of hours expended, and hence my outsourcing that work.
Sounds like @mblatz would pay himself at least $90/hr to mow lawns in the Dallas heat (I value my mowing time even cheaper, so I do it myself as well). Others might value their time differently.
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I’ve heard variations of this before and have used it myself, albeit with more intuition - and occasionally stubbornness - than actual calculation.
About 5 years ago the water line from the meter to the house developed a leak; naturally this was during the summer. For almost a week I foolishly dug hole after hole in my front yard trying to find it during the not-so-balmy temperatures the region experiences between 6 and 8 in the evening in August. I finally called a plumber since I wasn’t achieving results and was growing tired of flooding my yard to get a few minutes’ water in the house at fractional pressure. They at least had the good graces to wait for me to leave for work that day before fixing it - turns out my last hole was tantalizingly close to the line itself right where it was leaking. Was probably a 30-minute job for them and they even filled in the various holes I had dug.
I put a high premium on plumbing work as a result of that experience.
Same when it comes to exterior house painting - that’s a degree of mess, unforgiving, aggravatingly-elusive feel, and a task that requires absolute perfection that simply angers me. The fact that I managed to paint my shed to a degree that doesn’t drive me to try to punch holes through the two ⅜" layers of plywood cladding is amazing … but it’s also a shed rather than a house so my tolerance for imperfections is markedly higher.
Lawn mowing is a 45- to 60-minute task which - after the shed adventure in heat acclimation - isn’t that big of a deal. It’s grunt work for sure, but also a source of low-level accomplishment that’s all-too-absent from the desk job that pays the bills. My immediate neighbor mows lawns all summer and has a standing offer to do mine for $25 a week; I’ve yet to take him up on it.
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The nails thing is mostly just for speed. Even with a high end screw gun, it’s significantly faster to just use a nail gun to attach the panels. Probably find for toy putting up a fence over the weekend, but those guys got other jobs to go
I’m well aware of this. And nails can certainly hold up for many years - took more than 20 for my crappy builder-grade fence to fail and the landscape timber posts rotting at the base were the primary vector. The fact that those rails were thoroughly chowdered on the backside was more of an academic concern since they were utterly finished when I was replacing them; perhaps they’d seen multiple sets of pickets before meeting their demise.
But I’ve got some weird, I don’t know, aesthetic objection to nails and non-piloted screws. So I drill pilots whenever I’m sinking screws - limit the splitting and swelling that would otherwise be inevitable. No contractor is going to take the time to do this because it doubles the number of operations per picket without a corresponding price premium paid by the consumer.
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Piloted screws for a fence? At that level of cost and effort why not just switch to square cut nails? They look better than any screw and last at least as long.
I explained my level of rationalization - or possible lack thereof here:
Work’s been done for going on a year. I’ve also smashed fingers often enough to accept that swinging a hammer isn’t for me if it can be avoided.
That’s subjective. The Torx-head screws I used are readily reusable - a fact that will come in handy should I get the itch to stain the pickets in the future.