> It can also be hard to find a really skilled person that cares about your home as much as you. This is something I've found to be true. We bought a house th

> It can also be hard to find a really skilled person that cares about your home as much as you. This is something I've found to be true. We bought a house that we later found had some significant water damage issues. I hired a professional the first time we noticed it and he did little more than paper over the problem. I ended up spending the next two years basically tearing the wall apart and redoing all the sheathing and insulation and house wrap. Sure I could have hired someone and they would have eventually done all that for me, but I'm pretty confident it would have been in the tens of thousands of dollars by that point. Caring about the end result will get you a long way. But part of it is probably also that I come from a working class family and was immersed in the basics of that sort of work for my entire growing up time.