Comments on: 100 Things You Can Make Yourself

By: 100 Things You Can Make Yourself | My Mother Married A Felon

100 Things You Can Make Yourself | My Mother Married A Felon — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 11:46:00 +0000

[...] Via Get Rich Slowly. [...]

By: Jon Matthias

Jon Matthias — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 04:22:55 +0000

Taking the “cheapskate” mindset is ignoring the real question - how much is your time worth? Say you make $60k a year. That makes your hourly wage $30/hr. Think about how much time it takes to build, say, a bookshelf and comparing that buying it. However, if you are building it because woodworking happens to be your hobby, that’s different.

By: Jen

Jen — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:43:28 +0000

It is silly to buy $2000 worth of power tools to make a bookcase. It is not silly to buy them if you’re remodeling or renovating your own house. We have installed laminate flooring, moulding, redone our bathroom, and are soon going to be tearing out our stairway and foyer railings and floor and building a half wall and laying more laminate.

We use our tools, including our table saw, repeatedly. By doing so, we save money every time versus hiring someone to do the work for us, and we know the work will be done to our satisfaction. Anything beyond our capability, we do hire out, but we shop around and screen carefully, and limit the scope of the work to -only- that we cannot do ourselves.

By: joshuat

joshuat — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 03:47:25 +0000

I made my own beer.

It costs about $40 for a batch of 5 gallons, which is about 53 x 12oz bottles, or about 8 six packs. Typical microbrews and imports around here are $6-8 for good beers, for a savings of $12 to $30 per batch. I enjoy homebrew more than purchased because of the work I put into it.

By: J.D.

J.D. — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 01:58:55 +0000

@tsiroth

I’ve been kicking around a post about setting up a home shop at various budget levels, from finding cheap hand tools at garage sales to picking out decent power tools. As a long-time home-owner, I have every tool on that list. They remain unused 99.9999999% of the time. Not exactly a wise use of money.

As my friends and I have begun to realize that it’s stupid for us each to own a table saw, we’ve begun to keep mental lists of who owns what power tools. I know that Andrew, for example, just spent $500 on a whizbang compund miter saw. He knows that I have a table saw. We know that Paul has a planer and joiner.

Anyhow — this is just a lot of words to say: yeah, you’re right.

By: tsiroth

tsiroth — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 23:58:47 +0000

I eagerly (and perhaps naively) followed the link for building your own bookshelves. I thought I’d be looking at a hammer, nails and plywood project, likely a real money saver.

Given that the project actually described requires well over $500 worth of tools, it’s not clear to me how much can be saved. I can purchase reasonably nice bookshelves for $80, five of which hold my fairly large book collection.

I might be missing something, but it seems to me that one can only justify owning (for example) a table saw:

a) as a luxury for a woodworking hobby, which is perfectly valid, but we’re now out of money saving territory

b) to furnish an entire house and then some, which most just aren’t going to do

I’m skeptical as to whether these tools pay for themselves for most people.

By: Gwyn

Gwyn — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 23:52:23 +0000

Those potato chips are so good. I used to make ones just like them a lot. They really are easy to make (just don’t let them burn).