When DIY Goes Wrong: The Renovation Mistakes That Cost You Twice

Let’s say you did the DIY. It was a disaster and you’re like, dang it, I got to get this fixed. And I know now, because I did the DIY, I don’t want to do this again. It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. You also are going to pay somebody to come and undo what you did. Yeah. It costs you even more. Like if you now bring in a contractor and you’re like, Hey, we tried to do it ourselves the first time. It didn’t go well. He’s like, Oh, yeah. Well, normally I would charge you 12,000, but because I have to undo what you just did, I got to throw another $3,000 on top of that. Welcome to Return on Design, the podcast where beauty meets strategy and interiors become assets that perform. I’m your host, Rachel Niederhofer, designer, investor and builder of high impact spaces that deliver real results. Alongside my husband, I run both a design firm and a real estate investment company where I live at the intersection of creativity and ROI every day. Each week, I’ll be unpacking what most people overlook, how strategic design decisions can grow your investment, elevate your lifestyle and unlock the full potential of your property. You’ll get real tools, proven strategies and unfiltered conversations with industry experts who are doing it right. So if you’re ready to invest with purpose and leverage design as a powerful tool, this podcast is for you. Doing it yourself can feel like you’re saving money, but in actuality, you could be costing yourself thousands of dollars, not just in potential repairs, but when it comes to the resell of that property.

And that’s exactly what we’re going to dive in today, today. The cost of DIY thinking and how cutting corners on skilled labor could sabotage your investment and what you do to avoid it.

I’m Rachel Niederhofer.

And I’m Justin Niederhofer.

And this is Return on Design. The podcast where beauty meets strategy and interiors become assets that perform. Let’s dive into when DIY goes wrong. Brickwork, tilework, skilled trades, laborers that people often assume, oh, I could do that. They make it look so easy, right? I can just lay tile in my bathroom floor.

Yeah, it’s a lot harder than it looks. That’s why we have, you know, very skilled laborers that can do this, especially when you get into intricate jobs.

Just because you have seen someone on YouTube tell you that you can do the DIY project doesn’t mean that you should. Certain areas that you really should not touch unless you’re trained would be plumbing for sure. Electrical work.

Major electrical work. Changing an outlet is one thing, but if you’re having to rewire, get an electrician.

Yeah, I mean, you could put in a lighting fixture if you knew what you were doing. That’s not. Yeah. But yes, major electrical work. We have seen some hoopsie electrical jobs where you have outlets hidden behind drywall. Like somebody, okay, I don’t want to get too deep, but there is a specific example I could share with bad electrical that, yes, putting in an outlet is not that hard, but they put an outlet behind a drywall that had access under a, where like the,

The hot water heater was actually,

Right under the hot water heater. And they did this to try to

Install a home security system.

Yes, and hide all the wires, but I wouldn’t recommend doing that. It’s not up to code. You really have to be able to access the electrical. Mistakes like that. Amateur mistakes at that. That’s going to cost you money. It might look good initially to you because you just installed this security system as the example, but somebody’s going to have to fix that. It’s going to cost you in the end.

And sometimes that’s something you don’t even realize. Like when, when we actually found this particular instance, we had no clue it had been done that way. I mean, it was missed in the initial stages. So, you know, when you’re even evaluating a house that has been DIYed, those are things to take into consideration of what am I going to find in here or what could I potentially find in here that I’m now going to have to fix and fix correctly?

I mean, honestly, that wouldn’t have been, that specific one wouldn’t have been that major. You really wouldn’t have found it unless you took the wall down.

You know, another area where a bad DIY can cost you is tile work. And, you know, we see and we have seen on TV so many times, oh, it’s so easy to lay this backsplash. Well, if you don’t know how to prep the wall properly, you don’t use the correct mortar or even some of these new kind of stick on adhesive. If they’re still not applied correctly, they’re going to peel off. They’re going to start to fall. And that can cost you with a potential renter or buyer seeing that I know have to go in and fix what you did.

We’ve seen them.

We haven’t had one like that. We have dropped off.

That’s a leverage point because if I come into a house and it has some very strange architectural feature that is the result of a bad DIY job, well, I know I have to fix that because it’s going to hinder the ability to sell. It’s awkward. It doesn’t make sense. And it’s going to take a very specific buyer who either doesn’t care or for some strangers and would like something like that to buy it. So we got to come in and fix it. And so I’m not going to pay you what you think it’s worth because you added this patio extension. In actuality, you didn’t fully complete your patio extension and now it’s going to cost you money. You’re not going to just automatically recoup everything you’ve put into that because you increase the square footage.

Your patio extension you just did now is going to cost you more money because I’m dropping my offer because I have to now fix it and it’s going to cost me more money. Well, there was the house that we looked at that were, to your point here, the patio extension.

Or even that one with the windows. Oh, that probably was a DIY though.

Yeah. But the patio extension that we looked at and they actually didn’t even level the floor, remember? And so the extension, the floor was tilted for drainage like it had been if it was an outdoor patio. Well, you could see that slope. You could feel that slope. And we knew that if we were to purchase that house, we were actually going to have to gut the patio extension so that we could level the floor. Yes. And so, yeah, we definitely dropped our offer price on that because it was a poorly done addition.

Yeah. We see poorly done additions all the time. Yeah, we could throw arbitrary numbers. Yeah.

I think actually that example probably, I think we did drop our, we figured we were going to have to spend about $15,000 to pull everything out, level up the floor.

We’re talking about. There is a house I saw that I made an offer on and they had added a whole kitchen to a patio and it wasn’t level. They had enclosed it to some degree to make it look like part of the house, but it was very clear it was an addition and it wasn’t done with precision accuracy. The other thing that we consider a lot is most DIYers are not pulling permits. So you can run into issues where if you do have to do an extensive renovation on a project and pull permits, well, now you’re going to be liable to code. So anything that was done that wasn’t up to code, you’ve got to fix. So you automatically have to hedge a percentage of like, I can tell this is DIY. It may look pretty on the surface, but what do you say about lipstick on a pig? It’s still a pig. And we’re always assuming, okay, DIY, we’re going to have to come down probably another kitchen, as an example, like $25,000 to $30,000 on our offer right off the bat. Just knowing we don’t know exactly what we’re getting into, how extensive this is, how well it was done to begin with, and we’re for sure going to have to fix it. Yeah, like you could assume that kitchen was, you know, a $10,000 investment for whoever did it. I don’t know which one you’re talking about.

The one that they built the office into the patio and it dropped down off of the kitchen. Oh, that one. That’s the one I was talking about.

That one was more minor than this one that I saw.

It was more minor, but okay. So that leads us perfectly into the next section here of, you know, when the money lost is bigger than the money you spend on DIY. Yes. Sometimes, yes, doing a DIY, you could save a few bucks to do it, and it might be okay, but again, if done poorly, can cost you way more in the end.

Yeah. I mean, you could go and get a bid for, let’s say, a new tile shower, you know, your whole shower tiled, and maybe it’s going to be $15,000. You’re like, oh gosh, come on, I can buy the material for five. I can do it myself. I just saved me $10,000. It’s like, but did you really? Do you really know what you’re doing? Is this your first DIY? Are you accounting for all the time it’s going to take you to learn this trade? You know, don’t overlook the reality that you’re paying someone, their labor, their experience. Maybe you could get to that point, but it’s probably going to take you a significant amount of time. I mean, I bet wives could attest to this, how many men start projects and don’t finish them. You know, honey, I want that new bathroom to look this way. Okay, I’ll do it. Yeah. Well, when are you going to do it after working your full-time job, spending time with your family, sleeping, eating, taking care of all of your practical necessities? You’re going to squeeze in 45 minutes a week.

You’re going to do all those other things.

Yeah. And now your bathroom’s not functional.

And also forgetting the account of that skilled tradesman, that tile guy in this example, can actually help keep you from getting the wrong materials. How many have we seen where it’s, that tile was actually not meant for this application? And now you’ve got tile that in two years is falling apart because it wasn’t meant for your shower. Oh well, now I’ve got to rip out everything that we did. Realistically, I would say that if you’re looking at a job where I could potentially save 10,000, if I do it wrong, if it is wrong, the wrong materials, the wrong application, and it’s going to have to be redone especially, I’m going to drop my offer by double because I now have to come in and pay for the removal of that work plus the rebuild. So even just to break even that 10,000 is now costing me probably 20. Yes, easily. You could, absolutely. You could very easily potentially lose double that cost.

Yeah. So potentially, if you put 10,000, I mean, you can expect if done incorrectly, you’re going to not just lose 10,000, but probably 20,000 in total. So you really have to keep that in perspective.

Yeah. So now that bid estimate that the guy gave you for 15,000 and you were like, I can do it for 10, that 15,000 is not bad considering I could have potentially just lost another five over what I would have paid him.

Yeah. And he’ll get it done faster.

And he’ll get it done faster and correctly. Exactly.

Yeah. And they usually warranty their work. So if there is an issue,

They’ll come back and take care of it.

Typically. Make sure you.

Yeah. A good tradesman.

Oh, I have a beautiful, this isn’t even a DIY, or I don’t know if it was a DIY, but you see it often where people don’t measure ahead of time and like the tile will have to be redone. Like let’s say they didn’t prep correctly for the plumbing behind and in a tile job and you didn’t put the, the stubbins in the right spots. Well, now you tile all around it and maybe they are not straight, you know, like we’re assuming our stubbins were an alignment. They’re not now you tile it and you don’t see it all the time until it’s all covered up. Well, now you gotta I’m like covering my face. That’s really bad for filming. Now you have to redo something like that. I mean, it’s hard to like when you’re coming into a property that you’re going to buy potentially, you don’t necessarily always know was that a DIY job or was that a bad subcontractor job? Unfortunately, those exist also. Um, especially we see that when people claim that, oh, we’ve renovated this property, you know, we just flipped it and you’re like, who flipped it? You or an actual tile guy because it looks horrible. Yeah. Um, that we see frequently. It’s hard to know really was it the person that lived there per se that did the actual DIY.

With that, contractors do make mistakes too. There, things happen. Sometimes it doesn’t get done correctly. But with a contractor, at least when you have something that doesn’t pan out correctly, at least you have the opportunity to try and get it corrected. And it may not be no cost, but it’s the cost should be minimal, maybe a little bit in material that you have to correct. But in DIY, when it’s not correct, it’s not right. You’ve got the cost of material, you’ve got cost of dropped offers, you’ve got cost of redoing, you’ve got cost in time, and that’s snowballs for you very quickly. Very fast. Yeah. So your, your cost to get it corrected on a bad DIY cost you a whole lot more than the cost of getting it corrected with your contractor generally.

To add to that, you also have to, like, let’s say you did the DIY, it was a disaster and you’re like, dang it, I got to get this fixed. And I know now, because I did the DIY, I don’t want to do this again. It was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. Well, you’re not, you also are going to pay somebody to come and undo what you did. Yeah. You know, which could cost you even more. Like if you undo it yourself, you’re going to lose your time and maybe not, maybe not more financial and although your time should be worth money to you. But if you now bring in a contractor and you’re like, Hey, we tried to do it ourselves the first time. It didn’t go well. He’s like, Oh, yeah. Well, normally I would charge you $12,000. But because I have to undo what you just did, I got to throw another $3,000 on top of that. That can also occur if, you know, you hired the wrong tradesmen.

And hence, that’s, you know, also to that point, like he’s going to charge you more to undo it. That’s why as an investor, when we see it and look at it as like, that was a poor job. This is why my offer gets dropped by the amount that it is because I’ve got to spend the money to undo your poor job or your contractor’s poor job if you did hire a contractor and then redo it, you know, get it redone. You know, there are a lot of different things that, and some of this is personal dependent. You know, some people obviously are more handy in areas than others. You know, generally speaking, small repairs, small jobs, you know, changing a fix, a lighting fixture, changing a wall plug, changing even a small plumbing fixture in the bathroom at the sink. Those are not super complicated jobs. And most anybody can truly figure out how to do that and do it well, do it right and not spend, you know, a thousand bucks to pay somebody to come do it.

Well, and honestly, like my venture into the space of interior design started as DIY curiosity, like the creativity I had within and sort of the trial and error early on throughout the process. So it is very much dependent on the person. I would say the biggest takeaway is you have to assume that you may not get your money back versus assuming, oh, this is automatically going to translate to value. It could be the opposite where it’s going to cost you in the end, depending like a safe place to start would be paint, you know, like painting your wall, even wallpaper, although that could, you know, that can be difficult. Yeah, those are more like cosmetic aesthetics, I guess. Yeah. A tile job would not be ideal for your first renovation project. Like bathrooms are expensive because it can snowball, you have plumbing, which is a big deal. Most of the plumbing depending on the age of your house is probably going to be, you know, in the foundation somewhere. It’s not that easy always to just like move a tub from one wall to the other. Like it can get really extensive. So we’ve also seen like backflow problems when people try to put in sinks where you can have contamination issues where, you know, they’re like, oh, I’m just putting in this new, you know, I’m moving the sink over, let’s say, so all the plumbing was already on the wall. And it seems on the surface like, oh, that’s not the big of a deal. But if you don’t have the correct application internally, you know, it can have contamination issues. We just saw that on one of a remodel we recently did where it was a DIY bathroom and they’re the angle, right?

Yeah, the angle on one of the drainage pipes. It wasn’t, it wasn’t necessarily off, but it wasn’t done very, very well. And so it did have to be corrected so that it drained properly and flowed and didn’t create a stagnation of water. Yeah. And that was, that was part of the problem is it didn’t fully drain off like it was supposed to. So, you know, that allows you now to have a, you know, you get that weird funky smell from the sink. Yes. And it’s like, what is going on? Well, you might have a little bit of a drainage issue that’s backflowing or, you know, stagnating causing that problem. Yeah. You know, to your point, paint is a great place to start with. I mean, most people can paint. It’s easy to correct and touch up, you know, if your paint line gets off.

I would not recommend painting your kitchen cabinets though or any cabinets. You know, some people think, oh, I want to update my kitchen. I can just do this whole paint finish on the cabinetry. You can, but prep work on that is essential. And if you do it wrong, I mean, you’re just talking a tremendous amount of labor. And yeah, yeah, there’s a lot more depth that goes into painting cabinetry. And it might give you a superficial aesthetic initially, but you’ve got to make sure you do the paint right, seal it correctly. And cabinets are not cheap. So you could get into, I wouldn’t recommend that. First DIYer.

And a lot of that is market dependent. Yes. Very specific because, you know, we did a job that was, you know, two and a half hours away, and cost of labor was much different than where we’re at right now. And so in some areas,

It’s a good example of you’re going to see potentially big price variations because you might have a master plumber, which actually has a significant amount of training and they’re going to charge you more. They mean they have more experience.

They have more experience. They make sure and there are certain expectation levels that they have to maintain and knowing what permits have to be pulled when accountability. There’s a lot more accountability to them and

Same thing with the electrician. I mean, if you get a master electrician, it’s going to be different than somebody who’s like getting started maybe as an internship under a master. And that guy might be sufficient to come in and help do some smaller task items that don’t necessarily need that master licensing.

Yeah, sometimes it’s knowing to, yeah, the cost of a contractor is dependent on their level of skill. And that’s ultimately on these trades, what you’re paying for. Yes, you’re paying for their skill, their knowledge, their expertise that you don’t have.

And just from experience for us also, like be very leery about people who say, I can do it all. Yeah. Like, oh, I can do that. Oh, I thought you were a tile guy. Well, I’m a tile guy, but I do countertops too. Oh, you do. Okay.

Oh, and I do painting as well. Oh, you’re my DIY contractor. Yes. No.

I mean, we’ve experienced that a lot in our real estate business where we’re like, okay, well, let’s just start with what we hired you to do first.

And then we’ll see if we want to move forward with something else. But yeah.

And usually it doesn’t pan out that way because believe it or not, they don’t know all things. Yes. So be careful of that. I mean, that can be a trap where you’re paying somebody to actually do DIY. You’re not really getting that very skilled trade that you need, which can cost you money. So don’t fall into that trap either. And I know we have mentioned this before, that customizing for yourself or for the market, it’s 100% fine. And you should make your space for you, design it to what you like. But you don’t want to fall into that trap of if my goal is to sell maybe as an investor, or I know I’m only going to live here for maybe three years. And this is my first home as an example. You don’t want to fall into that trap of making it so customized to your personal taste that a lot of people probably wouldn’t like that. If you do do that, you just have to take on that risk. You have to assume is putting in this very eccentric bathroom as an example, which may cost me $20,000. If I don’t get that $20,000 back, is that okay with me? And just have a realistic perspective of like, you are going to have to assume a level of risk in that.

Yeah. And it is different, again, when it’s your home versus your investment property. If it’s your home, and you want to design it a little bit more to you, absolutely, that’s your house, that’s where you’re living. But if it’s your investment property, just because I like a little bit more rustic doesn’t mean I need to go do a custom wood-paneled wall. Is my future renter or buyer here going to really want that? Or would they prefer just a nice clean slate that they can see, oh, my furniture fits in here perfect instead of, I don’t like that.

Or even like a vacation property, like a lake house or a second home. You know, you don’t want to over-personalize that so much that if you decide a few years down the road, like, oh, we actually want to live in the mountains, not at the lake, you know, that you can’t sell it quickly. And when you actually do, when you actually are going to go down the DIY path, I mean, it’s very easy to get carried away because you don’t have somebody there to like balance that idea off necessarily or guide you strategically. And you know, it can snowball. That’s the word we use a lot, snowball, because it’s true. I mean, you might say, oh, I want to replace the shower. And so you take off all the tile and now you’re like, oh, well, I wasn’t expecting to have to change out the drywall. This drywall is not waterproof or it’s compromised. It’s moldy, let’s say. And you didn’t know that till you took the tile off.

Or you just damaged it trying to get the old tile off. That happens.

Yeah, very true.

You know, I mean, it’s tedious work to remove that work and then have to repair behind so that you can then rebuild.

So you’re like, oh, I took all the DIY lessons for tile, but now this is drywall. And oh, gosh, I wasn’t ready to do drywall work too. Or yeah, you only take the tiles off to try to upgrade the color because you don’t like the color, but the other horrible DIY idea that I’ve seen trending a lot is painting your tile even. It might look good for a while, but the application process, is that going to stick to that tile? And is it going to last? And if it only lasts three years and now it’s flaking off and you need to sell your house, well, you probably shouldn’t have painted it. Or you’re going to have to paint it again.

And now you’re going to have to strip all that off and redo it.

Yeah, just like you have design trends. We’ve seen a lot of DIY trends. We’re like, everyone’s doing this. It’s so easy. I just wouldn’t fall into that trap. So yeah, I’m segueing back into that. Like DIY is not free necessarily. It’s not always the best choice. We’re not necessarily encouraging you to not ever do DIY or explore different trades. I mean, that could lead you down a path that maybe you’re supposed to be on. But just being very intentional about what you choose to DIY, making sure you are equipping yourself with all of the right resources and material before you just jump off that cliff into something that could very well cost you a tremendous amount of time, money.

Yes, smart investors and smart homeowners. Yes, you can do things yourself, but the good ones know when I need to hire that contractor or that tradesman to come in and do this because it’s beyond my capabilities. I mean, I can’t learn how to do it, but it’s beyond what I’m capable of doing right now. And in the end, we’ll save you money.

Yeah, even hiring an interior designer. I mean, we’ve seen that a lot too, where people have already done a renovation. They hired a contractor to come in, but there was no intentionality. And now we have to kind of redo things that were overlooked from a design perspective. You could easily that can happen in a DIY also. Like if you’re only focused on the aesthetic and you’re not considering all the facets of what could potentially be affected by what seems like maybe a small change initially, that can also carry on into a whole another cost.

I guess to sum it up, we’re not saying don’t do DIY at all. DIY is okay. DIY can be beneficial, but it’s being strategic, being smart about where you do it and when you don’t. And making sure that if it’s an area where it might really be a little bit more complicated, just hiring the right people and manage the process. That way you continue to move your projects forward and you don’t sabotage your returns. You don’t sabotage the potential savings that you thought you were going to save by having to redo bad work. If this episode opened your eyes on DIY and benefits, pros, cons, and you like what you’re here, please make sure that you like, follow, subscribe, check us out on social media, follow us on our websites.

Stay in touch because we’re going to continue to unpack real life examples and equip you with strategy and tools to help you succeed in your real estate ventures, whether it’s design or your flipping properties.

So we’ll see you in the next one. See you next week.