DIY home improvement and décor ideas can be cost-effective and allow you to get creative and incorporate changes you like. You do not have to explain project requirements to remodelers, weigh alternative options, and adjust your schedule according to their availability while paying a hefty amount. In places like Long Island, where the home improvement costs can range between $150,000 and $250,000, most homeowners might be compelled to perform maintenance and improvement tasks themselves.
However, most home improvement tasks are risky, complex, and require professional assistance and knowledge. While the DIY route seems affordable initially, it can incur substantial costs if you lack the expertise. Hiring an expert is the safest and wisest decision to prevent risks, unexpected damage, and associated repair costs.
Let’s discuss a few home improvement tasks you should leave to the experts:
1. Plumbing
Plumbing involves installing, changing, or maintaining water supply, drainage, or sanitary system. Plumbing is not something non-specialists can do. A layperson hardly knows the measurements of pipelines, pipe knobs, and tools, let alone fix them. Self-service experiments with a minor fixture issue can cause heavy damage and disturb all supply lines.
Consulting with experienced plumbers is advised. They possess years of experience dealing with fixtures, faults, repairs, and maintenance. Alongside offering quality services, they can ensure you avoid incurring further costs.
So, look for reliable and accredited plumbing experts in your region to tackle all your plumbing issues. If you’re in Long Island, hire plumbers with a BBB A+ rating. Varsity Home Service is a reliable Long Island plumbing company with over 50 years of experience. Not only do they offer exceptional services, but they’re available 24/7 to answer your queries.
2. Electricity Installations and Repairs
Electricity installations and repairs are the riskiest home improvement tasks. It takes rigorous training, knowledge, and years of practical work for technicians and electricians to understand and handle electrical systems. Even then, they often encounter unexpected accidents that can endanger their lives.
However, risks and mishaps are higher for non-specialists. Color codes, numbers, and other operating specifications on circuits and power supply lines are beyond a common person’s knowledge and understanding. Any wrong connection and mishandling can cause sparking and light up your house to ashes. Mere negligence can also endanger you with electrocution and cost you irreparable damage. Hence, electricity is not something you can experiment with causally. Hire an electrician even for minor repairs, installation, or fitting of electrical connections.
3. Fitting Electronic Appliances
Fitting fridges, ovens, dishwashers, washing machines, air-conditioners, stoves, and other electronics on static surfaces is a trending interior decor concept. It can give a neat, organized, and compact look, and many experiment with their free-standing appliances and adjust them all by themselves. But this is risky. First, it involves interference with electricity, and second, you must make architectural changes in your home.
Drilling, breaking, and kneeling walls and ceilings can cause costly damage to a house’s structure. It’s an extensive house improvement project requiring a coordinated effort of electricians, plumbers, architects, and other experts. So, engage these pros and prevent unnecessary expenditure.
4. Painting
Paint is made of hazardous chemicals that can cause several health issues if ingested or inhaled. Paint chemicals can also cause skin allergies if you work with bare hands. Accidental splashes while painting walls and ceilings can cause severe allergies. Unintentional hand-to-mouth contact can expose you to toxins and chemicals in paint. Sanding or peeling off older paint is another risky activity. If you do not have prior work experience, an experiment can trigger toxin release and dust particles everywhere, increasing your chances of ingestion and inhalation. If plastering and paint on your walls and ceilings have hazardous materials, these activities can increase the odds of fatal health issues. For instance, asbestos exposure is expected in such activities. Even then, painting may be a relatively doable home improvement activity. But it is not free from risks. So, do not take unnecessary risks and seek professional services.
5. Plastering
Plastering means smoothing out and covering walls, ceilings, floors, and other rough surfaces and columns of a building with a plaster material, where plaster material is a mixture of cement, sand, and water. Plaster material can also contain other substances like plastic, marble, gypsum, granite, silicon, and asbestos to enhance the strength, resistance, insulation, texture, and other properties of a building’s coating.
Since plastering contains hazardous substances, it is not safe for DIY. Dust particles from plastering work can cause irritation and severe respiratory allergies. Plastering can also expose you to harmful substances, such as asbestos, sulfur dioxide, lead, silica, adhesives, and other chemicals. In short, plastering is also a specialized activity that only professionals can perform. Hence, hire professionals for such improvements.
6. Roofing
Roofing often entails constructing, mending, altering, or repairing a rooftop. It can involve an extensive overhaul of the entire roof to incorporate architectural changes in your house. Either way, such tasks are beyond a layperson’s capabilities. Roofing repair, maintenance, or replacement work requires working at heights. Carelessness at height can cause slips, falls, or injuries from equipment mishandling. Plastering, tiling, plumbing, or other such activities in roofing can trigger allergies and expose you to hazardous substances.
What’s more, mishaps and dangers in roofing work account for a quarter of all construction-related casualties. So, it is not fit for DIY work. You must hire an experienced construction worker or roofer to avoid unexpected mishaps and accidents.
7. Major Repairs and Maintenance Work
If you opt for a complete architectural transformation of your home, sign a construction agreement with a contractor. For instance, foundation repairs, roofing, demolition and building a new partition, installing, changing, and fitting new doors, windows, etc., are improvements only professionals can make properly and safely.
Major improvements are also complex if you look at construction-related compliance, safety, quality standards, protocols, and inspections that only experts know how to comply with and manage. Besides, most homeowners often do not understand such details and complexities.
Conclusion
Professional work seems costly, but long-term benefits are worth the expenditure and effort. An expert can finish a project within a designated deadline and prevent more miscellaneous expenses. Experienced workers will also guarantee quality work that lasts longer and requires occasional maintenance and repair work. Hence, leave expensive, extensive, and high-risk improvement projects to the experts.
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