When it comes to performing maintenance around various corners of your house and fixing faulty faucets and fridges that don’t freeze, there are some tasks that you can take care of yourself fairly easily.
Why call in the air support for a minor window mesh hole you can patch up yourself, or for changing your lock or a bulb?
But then again, there are those home maintenance and remodeling tasks you shouldn’t attempt to do on your own. Of course, there’s no one to stop you from trying, but the thing is that you may end up doing more harm than good, especially if you have no prior training for tackling the task you set your sights on.
Tile work, for example, can be a particularly difficult one because if you set up a bunch of tiles wrong and you’ve already glued them all together, you’ll not only have to remove them but in doing so you will probably break them all. So, that’s doing the job two times, not being even close to finishing it, and losing your tile money.
In this article, we’re going to talk about the sorts of remodeling jobs that will spice up your exterior, but you may want to hire a professional for. As you will see, these would be the tasks that require a special sort of skills that you cannot learn overnight, so playing it safe might be a better way to do it.
Here’s the deal.
Under-bench Dishwasher Installation
If you’ve set your gaze upon a mighty dishwasher that’s built to be fitted under your kitchen bench, you may start looking for a handyman in your vicinity, too.
While fitting a regular dishwasher may seem like a fairly straightforward procedure, weaseling an under-bench model in its spot requires a considerably higher amount of effort.
The thing is, what you need to be thinking about before attempting to set this up would be the water source, connecting all the electrical wires, and then ensuring all of it sticks in its place. A regular dishwasher will just stand wherever you place it, but an under-bench model needs to be secured against tipping, because if this happens and the wire installations and the water hose get ripped at the same time – you’ll be in all sorts of trouble.
Tile-Laying Jobs
As we mentioned already in the introduction to this article, one of the tasks you can mess up terribly and that seems relatively straightforward is tiling.
Tile-laying requires you to use an appropriate amount of glue for every tile, to have the underlying surface flattened out perfectly before you begin, and then you need to use spacers to measure the distance between tiles with the precision being a fraction of a millimeter. (Or, a fraction of an inch if you live outside Australia and happen to be using the imperial system.)
Now, how you may want to proceed here is to get both a plumber and a tiler to get this job done and done well. You can find reliable plumbers at Canberra Plumbing, for example. As for the tiler, you can find one locally.
Bolting a Heavy Appliance to a Wall
Here’s one of those seemingly simple jobs that can go wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing.
To be more precise, the biggest problem with bolting something heavy (and particularly something heavy AND valuable such as a TV set or an air-conditioner) to a wall badly is the potential for it to fall to the ground at one point in time – and it’s the delay that makes it so spooky.
You may be fine for months after botching a bolting operation such as this, so to speak, but the poorly fitted bolts in the wall will slowly start to weasel themselves out of the position until one day you’ll just hear a smashing sound of your TV set collapsing on the living room floor.
So, to prevent this horrific turn of events, consider hiring a local handyman who knows how to work with specialized bolts, plastic anchors, and other small contraptions that you need to attach something to a wall.
Lead-Based Paint Removal
If you live in an older home and you haven’t done a new paint job in a long time, chances are – you still have some walls painted with now obsolete and potentially dangerous lead-based paint. Many homes in Australia used to be painted with this paint in the past, so even nowadays a large number of houses still face problems with it.
Now, if you don’t mess with the walls, you may not experience any health problems at all, but if you try to remove the paint to paint the wall with some other paint, for example, you will be exposing yourself to all the harmful lead that these paints used to contain.
This is why you may want to hire a professional painter to get this done for you because there is a special procedure that needs to be followed as well as special protective equipment that needs to be worn to safely remove lead-based paint.
All in all, while admitting that you may need help with some remodeling task in your home can be a tad irritating, hiring a professional to do the job well will probably end up costing you less money and effort than if you tried to do it yourself and then botched it. The bottom line, having home maintenance and remodeling task done by a pro is more than anything an excellent long-term choice, because you can rest assured that you won’t have to do it again for a long time.
Ron Wolf is a hobby designer and a DIY enthusiast, and, above all, a very blessed father of two. Besides that, he has a strong passion for writing. He is a featured blogger at various blogs and magazines in which he shared his research and experience with the vast online community. If he is not working he enjoys being outside with his family. Hiking, bike riding, and BBQing are always a thing for him. In the evening, he likes to watch documentaries or build something with kids in their lego corner.
