The Carolina Contractor Show
The Carolina Contractor Show
DIY or PRO: That’s the Question...
Choosing between DIY projects and hiring professionals can feel overwhelming. This episode grapples with crucial considerations for homeowners looking to tackle improvement projects, unearthing valuable insights and practical advice. We explore how to assess personal skills and tools, the importance of safety, and when it makes sense to call in a professional. The discussion also emphasizes understanding potential costs and effort, creating balance within home improvements. Whether you're a seasoned DIY enthusiast or just starting to consider home repairs, this episode aims to provide clarity in your decision-making process. Dive in as we break it down and help you discover the right path for your home projects. Make sure to subscribe, share your thoughts, and leave us a review!
Welcome to the Carolina Contractor Show with your host, General Contractor Donnie Blanchard. I'm bored Football's over. I don't know what to do anymore. Donnie, yeah, I know the feeling.
Speaker 2:I mean we got a little bit of basketball left, but you know, after that it's just baseball for several months. And I like baseball. I just don't like to watch it on TV.
Speaker 1:Same here, and I also don't like going to a baseball game to have social time and talk. I actually get involved in the games, even if it's not teams, I like. Even if it's college ball. I like to watch the game, not just chit chat. Yep, agreed, and and maybe drink a beer right behind you on that one? Yep, all right. This is Carolina contractor show. My name is Eric Smith. I do inside sales for home builders and Wilson Greenville, across from me, donnie Blanchard, general contractor. Owner of Sure Top Roofing. Owner of Blanchard Building Company. Also, he's the guy that put the hip in Hip and Ridge and our show is again. We sometimes start off with sports, but our show is actually about building and construction and house and boy. Today the show's title is really going to work into the subject we're going to talk about. We'll get to that in a sec. We have a website, which is kind of awesome. Does everybody have a website? Now? Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, it's not that big of a deal. Marowint, used to be a big deal to have your own website.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I bought donnyblanchardcom, I just never did anything with it.
Speaker 1:I didn't want anybody else to have yourself. Our website is thecarolinacontractorcom and there you can find links to our past shows that we have in podcast form. They're listed by subject title, so if there's something specific you want to learn about your house or about the show or something we talked about, you can do it that way, and we like to talk again about all parts of your house the inside, the outside, roofs and basements and, like today's subject, diy projects. I think one time we referred to the show as the port center of DIYers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's about right man, and we just don't have that kind of audience. I wish we did. If you go to the website.
Speaker 1:you'll also find our YouTube page where you can watch the show and you can also find links to things we've talked about. If you have a question about your house, or after today's show you have a question, you can click on the Ask the Contractor button. That goes straight to Donnie Blanchard, again a general contractor. So if he can't answer it, he knows people who can. And then again, if you just hang out at that site, you can find stuff. But the YouTube site is a lot more interactive. So we recommend checking out the Carolina Contractor on the YouTube site. Now I said, donnie, today show is really going to be talking about something that the show's whole premise is almost about, and that is DIY. But the curve ball is DIY, or P R O. In other words, if you have a project coming out you're thinking about doing, when do you know you should have a a do it yourself thing or maybe call a pro? We've all come across those moments. I'm sure you have too, even though you're a general contractor.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, yeah, and I'm not too proud to say certain things might whip me around the house, but there are a lot of things that are totally DIY and if you don't at least attempt to tackle it, that's just plain old lazy. Because YouTube is basically a tutorial for every subject you can think of and most people are pretty smart and if you've been a homeowner for a while, especially you guys, probably pretty handy around the house.
Speaker 1:It's funny because back when we were growing up, there was nothing like YouTube or just grabbing your smartphone, scanning something, and it instantly comes back and tells you what it is. So, to be quite honest, if you have a project at your house, you have no excuse to not at least have working knowledge of what it is, just based on YouTube, diy videos, scanning things. Man, we had to learn the hard way and read books Some of you books are those well nevermind. So it really is a lot easier and you will save yourself a lot of money, because there are times you will need to call a pro. Pros are expensive and service calls are expensive. So if you can fix a small problem at your house, go ahead and do it. Some of these aren't problems or maintenance related. They're just upgrades or something you want to do. But before we start in and Donnie's got a lot of experience on some of these projects I think the first thing you have to do before you tackle a DIY project say, you're going to fix a leaky faucet or you want to do some painting is one do you have the tools that are needed to take care of it?
Speaker 1:Do you have the skill level? Are you handy with basic tools A saw. Do you know how to correctly read a tape measure? A lot of people don't know that. Another thing risk you got to think about the safety. If you're not comfortable working with electricity, don't work with electricity. If you're not comfortable holding up an LVL, maybe you should have a pro. Put that extension in. And also the amount of time, the hours you're going to spend doing it. Your time is worth money. You might not be getting paid for it, but your time is still worth something. So is that a worthwhile endeavor? And finally, the whole point of a DIY is to save money versus hiring a professional to come in. So if you can do it for yourself, some people I'm this way. I like doing a DIY because when it's done I kind of sit back and I do two things I go, I did it and then I nitpick my own work. But do you take a little satisfaction when you do a?
Speaker 2:DIY project. Oh yeah, and I just want to say to all my handy homeowners out there I think one thing that you should consider is if you nice, if you see a project that you can do in another room or say it's outside, it's not going to impact the house or the flow of traffic through the house, then it's probably okay to take it on. I get called into situations all the time where the husband or the wife's taking on a project and basically they have the whole house in shambles and they're just in a pickle. They got in over their heads and they finally called a pro in and of course we usually go in, tidy that up up and we got them back to their normal life in about a week or so. But that would be my delineation on whether or not you take it on. Are you going to mess up everything? Are you going to end up in trouble with your wife and and you know is your house just going to be a mess for the whole duration of the project?
Speaker 1:Also, if you have a buddy who redid the tile in his floor or remodeled his downstairs bathroom and made it look easy, pick his brain and ask him first have you done this before? How did you do it so easily? Your buddies and neighbors can make a project look easy, but they might just have maybe not training, but just a natural ability to do stuff that you might not have the ability to do. I'm not going to take out my kitchen and do anything because, like you said, workflow, family flow. You start working on the kitchen, everything stops and now you're stepping over boards and tile and you're doing demo and it can get nasty real quick. So that's a DIY project I can't do. But I know some people who have demoed their kitchen and redone it and I'm amazed at how well it came out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the things I was talking about or referring to earlier more, more or less just one-off projects. So we'll get into several examples in the show. But if it's an addition or a remodel, we preach all the time that a contractor has a lot of value. Because if you're going to buy, if you have multiple trades involved say there's seven, eight people that have to come in there and you have to find all those people. Number one.
Speaker 2:That's a lot of work but those people aren't going to give you a contractor price. They know it's a one-time deal, they're going to be in and out and you're never going to call them again. So a contractor is going to get a 20, 30% better price. And if that contractor charges you 20 or 30% to do your remodel, you're basically letting him do all the legwork with people he has a really good relationship with. They've all been vetted, they're all insured. So you're cutting a lot of red tape and risk out if you go that route. And I'm not encouraging hiring a contractor for everything. We encourage the DIY part, but I'd say things that have more than five, six, seven trades probably qualify for a contractor.
Speaker 1:Yeah, straight up Plus the amount of money you're going to spend. You'll need permits pulled. You don't want to get involved in the paperwork also that can come involved with a big project. So let's stick to smaller stuff. I like the idea of painting a room. I have this fantasy that I wake up on a Saturday morning at six, have a cup of coffee and I'm just going to paint one room, and the night before I may have even moved the furniture to the center, put down drop cloths, maybe even taped some, but I never pull the trigger because I've never had good luck with doing it. Now there's some stuff you can do for painting. That's DIY. One room a day. Don't try to do you know four or five rooms. Um debux for paint, maybe a brush or a roller. Uh, change a room instantly and be happy with it. There's time when it comes to a pro which would drywall repair before you paint. I can't do it.
Speaker 2:I'm no good at it. It's not rocket science, but it takes a lot of patience and, um, you know, that's one of those things where you don't really need a lot of prep work for the drywall portion of that project, so you can go a couple of days in advance, you want to let it dry, you want to take the time to sand and if you really feeling frisky and you want to take that paint on. Just remember, the painter's tape is your friend. And, side note there, the blue painter's tape works fine. If you have any kind of cabinets or anything with a wood finish, they recommend the green frog tape for that because it's a lot better than the blue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it won't pull off that finish or cause damage to it. The other advantage of a pro, though, is you could get up early on Saturday and do prep work and paint your room and get a high off the fumes, get a buzz, or for a few hundred bucks, three, four, maybe 500 bucks you could have a pro come in and they're going to knock it out. So quick Talk about time and money you can have a brand new looking room with drywall dents or stuff replaced and patched in advance, and just have a beautiful room and basically, a few hours.
Speaker 2:I have a great painter I mean just very conscientious dude, and when he comes into a house, or if I send him into a house, rather, he's just very, very cautious about anything that can go wrong. So his preparation is unparalleled and everybody just loves that. If you're doing it for yourself, maybe you're. You know, take a shortcut here, take a shortcut there, and I think what you said I'm in agreement with, because you know painters gonna they're gonna cross their T's and dot their I's and get get out of your hair faster than you will.
Speaker 1:And I do want to back up a little bit. When I talk about a pro, I'm not saying like you, donnie, being in the business, and me a little bit in the we know pros who we're friends with. But be careful hiring your buddy or somebody your spouse recommended at work who does it on the side, because I like to be able to not literally but figuratively yell if they botch the job or don't do something right. And if it's your pastor from church who did it and he didn't do it well or didn't do it right, it's hard for you to go dude. This is incorrect. This is no way. I'm not going to stand for it. It puts you in a position. That's the other reason I like to call a pro for any project.
Speaker 2:Yeah, full agreement there. Yeah, definitely want to disconnect from that friendship in case anything goes wrong. All right, Water.
Speaker 1:I don't like dealing with pressurized lines, but if you notice you've got a leak under your sink, something small or a faucet head won't stop dripping odors from your sink that's usually fixed with cleaning out the P-trap and that sounds naughty. It's not that hard to do. You have a plastic bin. You can drain the water and take care of that. But there are some times you don't want to mess with water lines or leaks and have you ever had a bad leak where you've had to call pro Donnie? Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:And I live in an older home and we were building our current house, and so it was. It was a constant not a constant nightmare, but something we had to deal with all the time. And it had copper pipes and, of course, cast iron drains. So if you had lived in an older home with the copper, course, cast iron drains, so, uh, if you had lived in an older home with the copper, those connections are usually soldered, so you're at the mercy of, uh, the the soldering skill of that plumber back 40, 50 years ago, and most of them did a great job. You know, they people seem to be really good craftsmen from that era. But now you know, everything's changed over to plastic and, um, basically it's called PEX for the supply lines and then PVC for the drain lines.
Speaker 2:And we did a show a while back where we talked about all those older homes with the copper and the cast iron. They're huge conductors. So if you get a lightning strike on your house and it's not grounded properly, that electricity is going to run through the copper lines and, heaven forbid, you'd be in a shower. But, to answer your question, the only thing I've really ever had a problem with is a house that had copper, because if you're on, what is it? Well water? That well water has minerals in it that will corrode those copper pipes from the inside out. So you know it's an accident waiting to happen.
Speaker 1:I've not had any major leaks, but what I found out is one time an upper bathroom showerhead, behind the actual wall, had a small leak and it was dripping down and it just follows the path of least resistance so it put a stain in the kitchen ceiling. The reason it was great to call the pro was he found a second one. So if I'd gone up and said, oh, I found it, I can fix this, tighten it down, cut out the drywall patch, put new in, tape it, mud it, paint it, within a few months it would have started a second time. So a pro can find stuff when it comes to water leaks that you might, as a DIYer, miss, and you're right back to square one.
Speaker 2:You know I stand corrected. I do remember I did have a major leak in my existing house now, but it was only because my ex-wife turned the sink on to fill it up and just walked away and forgot about it. You know, not really a product of bad workmanship, it was just maybe some ADD going on there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Now how do you go about finding the right plumber?
Speaker 2:Oh, don't shop at the ABC store. Oh, don't shop at the ABC store. Oh, you said plumber, not painter. Sorry, say she rocker. Exactly no, the plumbing supply house is a great place to start, because the plumbing supply house is, you know, they're tied into whoever buys from them and they know who would be a good fit for you. If you just need some fixtures changed out, then that's one thing. But if you need, you know, full blown remodel and you need things disconnected so you can gut a bathroom and then reconnected new fixtures put in. Probably somebody, a plumber, with a little bit of help. Some plumbers roll solo, so they're perfect for smaller jobs. Some plumbers have two or three helpers and then if you just cold call a plumbing company, you're probably going to get a newbie who's been out of school for a few years, and not to say that there's anything wrong with that, but it's hit or miss. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's why it is always good to call a pro. I I have a couple on call and I have an electrician that I like, that I also do the plumbing and it's those HVAC. Electric plumbing guys are usually really good to have around. Speaking of electrical, I'm not. I respect electricity. I'll make small electric repairs. I put in light switches definitely a DIY project Ceiling fans I probably put in five or six over my lifetime. Those are pretty easy to do. Some loose wiring that you can kind of understand what's causing it and it's just going to be something you need to tighten up. That's pretty easy. But if you're not comfortable around electricity, quickly make the decision to call a pro, because electricity don't play around and if you don't know what you're doing, you might not hurt yourself, but you could short something out and cause an expensive problem where, like we talked with water, you end up having to call a pro to come in and fix what you did wrong. Oh for sure.
Speaker 2:And something to remember with electricity is if you're changing out a light fixture overhead or a ceiling fan, you know it's always dead at the switch. So, um, if you turn that switch off, there's no electricity going to that fixture. But, even safer, if you're changing out, you know that switch or outlets in a room, then finding the breaker is a really big deal. So if your breaker box isn't labeled correctly, you know that could be a shocker and uh, it's. Uh, it's one of those deals where, uh, most people, most fans, they take a lot of time, but that's definitely a DIY project.
Speaker 2:Um, the overhead lights, nothing to it, you just take some moment to figure it out. Uh, I'd say one of the tricky ones is recess cans in like a bathroom area, cause they have an extra lens over there and people try to unscrew those and everything. But it's usually just a quarter turn and it drops out of a uh, of a groove. So it's one of those deals where it's a little bit of an extra step, but definitely not something you need to call in a pro for.
Speaker 1:Remember the old joke? Uh, my friends were shocked when they found out what a bad electrician I was. Yeah, there you go. You've used that before. All right, I've enjoyed the well, occasionally warm weather. The it's North Carolina is being North Carolina right now. It's snowing. One day it's 72 days later, it's back down to 33 days later, but we are getting an idea of spring is coming and warm weather's here. So we like to move outside and, of course, move out to the deck.
Speaker 1:If you have one, decks are a unique beast because there is a general maintenance you need for, say, a wood deck. You need to clean them and stain them and keep them sealed. But sometimes you come across a board that's bad and you have to make a replacement. That's not too difficult either. If you know the size of your board if it's a 5-6, or if it's an old 2x4 or whatever it is you can go to the lumber store and replace it. You might be able to match the stain.
Speaker 1:Pressure wash is not hard. Staining is actually not very hard. If you do a little research, you know if you got a saw and some lumber and some deck nails or deck screws, you can do a lot of repairs and get your deck up to shape. If your deck bounces or you're noticing a post doesn't look correct. If you've got a joist issue, if you don't know what a joist is, definitely call a pro, because there's rules and regulations on railings based on height. People put oh my God, people put hot tubs on decks that are not reinforced to hold hot tubs.
Speaker 2:Water's what? 8.6 pounds per gallon, and I don't know how many gallons of water in a regular hot tub, but that's a lot of weight dude.
Speaker 1:Three, four people. Let's just say they're 200 pounds average. Yeah, all that water plus the hot tub itself, and you got two foot spans on the joist. I mean that's crazy. People have gotten hurt and they just don't realize how much weight. You can't just set something heavy on a deck. So if you notice problems that are maybe out of your range, call a pro, and it's not terribly expensive to rip off the top of a deck and have it redone correctly.
Speaker 2:In the hot tub scenario, I recommend at least having it reinforced and you probably have to add something that's going to go all the way down to the ground and have to sit on concrete. But in that scenario it's definitely worth checking that out and hopefully you don't do a DIY hot tub and you have somebody else involved with that. But yeah, bouncy deck doesn't mean anything's wrong with the deck. It probably means something's bad with the construction. Donnie, do you have a composite decking?
Speaker 1:Yes, I do. Okay, I changed everything out to that and I know you're a big fan. I still have lumber. The other thing about some of the composite decking is, I think, depending on the manufacturer, your joy space has to be closer too.
Speaker 2:It depends, but composite decking is not as rigid as a treated lumber deck board. So that is the explanation behind the tighter spacing. I didn't really have a choice with ours, but we did something where we kind of ran them on a diagonal and that made up for the increased spacing between the deck joists.
Speaker 1:Well, it is a DIY project. It can be. It's not like an afternoon. You can get it done. What I do know on some of the composite decking is the joist space has to be definitely under two feet. Sometimes it's got to be definitely under two feet. Sometimes it's got to be 16 inches. It depends on the manufacturer. But mine is two feet joist spaces, which is fine for two by fours and whatnot. But a lot of people will take off the top of their deck and say I'm going to put on composite and they'll put on the lower end treks or something and it will really bounce and you've got to take that in consideration before you think this spring I'm going to get a composite deck. You might have to put in double the joists just to make it sit in place correctly.
Speaker 2:And then the increased cost of the composite deck itself. And a lot of people don't take into account how hot that's going to get and you can't walk on it barefooted. That's a big complaint that I hear about and I don't walk on it barefooted. That's a big complaint that I hear about and I don't really go around barefooted. So I enjoy mine because it looks great and is very durable. And another misconception is people don't realize that composite decking actually has real wood in it. It's basically a mixture of wood and plastic both, so it still has a lot of natural wood properties there.
Speaker 2:And big thing I see with decks when I talked about the bad construction a second ago is the decks that have problems. It usually comes down to the band flashing. So the band is the member that all the joists are tied into that is bolted to the floor area of your house. I'm trying to simplify this here, but the band is bolted right against the house. It's the very first piece of wood that touches the actual house itself. And where people make a mistake is they don't have that I'm going to try to give a good verbal description an S shaped flashing, so it goes behind the siding, If you have siding or or brick. It needs to be cut into the brick, but that's a long explanation. Behind the siding, out over the deck band, which is an inch and a half thick, and then down I don't know an inch and a half, two inches, and what that does is that keeps water from you, get a hard rainstorm and you're inside, you're not seeing what's happening outside, so that rain, month after month, year after year, gets down behind that deck band. And if that deck band is the first member that's attached to your actual house, if it fails the whole deck fails. And the second thing that we see and a lot of inspectors call this out is people don't put lag bolts through the band. So definitely a lag bolt or a lag screw should go all the way through the band and you should have a nut and a washer on the inside of the crawl space. So those two are really big deals.
Speaker 2:And you mentioned joist spacing two foot. I'm not a fan of. But if you do a two foot joist spacing on your deck, then you need a bigger member. You can't pull off a two by six in that scenario, but a lot of people try it and you definitely need at least a two by eight, two by 10. So bigger spacing requires bigger joist members.
Speaker 2:And that's what she said Not going to go there, Eric. What else? Oh, I wanted to mention the treated wood talk. A lot of people think treated wood's poisonous, you can't touch it, and some of that's true and some of it isn't, because they treat it a different way than they did, you know, 20, 30 years ago. But they have ground and you probably know more about this than me with the building supplies. But they have three ratings, and one is ground contact, one is above ground and the other is just deck lumber. And out of those three, you know, I want to say they're treated with some type of arson Arsenic, Carbon, copper, arsenic yeah, arsenic, it's a funky name but it's a form of arson that you definitely don't need to come in contact with your bare skin. And the only one of those three that you can is the deck lumber, because it's mildly treated. So just to throw that out there, it's not anywhere near what it used to be and it is safe. But if you're paranoid about it, just throw on a pair of gloves.
Speaker 1:Or again the point of the show DIY or pro. You might want to call a pro and let them take care of it. If you are also putting up a post on top of your deck, or maybe you have a porch out front, uh, put in a post base or a spacer, because that helps a lot of water go around the base of the post and not rot out the bottom, cause that's usually where post and and uh similar items rot out, because they're literally ground contact or wood to wood contact. Yep, agreed, good call, eric, let's move back inside. Um, you look inside your bathroom and you notice you got a cracked tile.
Speaker 1:This is where the people that are good at this drive me nuts because they go oh, we'll just tear up the whole floor and replace it. We can do it on a long weekend and I'm like no, how do you know if you can replace a tile Depending on how it's in? If it was put in as individual tiles, you might be able to literally wedge it out. If you have the replacement, that might be tougher to match it, but might be tougher to match it. But in theory you can put it back in and seal it. You know, chisel it out, add some grout couple hours.
Speaker 1:If you know what you're doing Multiple cracks or if you've got floor damage, I would call a pro. The other reason I'd call a pro is because if it's tile around water, you want to make sure there's not water underneath it. And a pro that's one of the things they're supposed to do is say, hey, the tile, I can fix it, but it got some water back beneath it, so we need to kick up five more and make sure we have this put in and waterproof, correct.
Speaker 2:Yep, agreed, yeah, that's. That's something that we see all the time. We're about to dive into a master bathroom remodel where that happened and you can literally um bounce the floor right outside of the shower dam right there and uh, it's um. It's a scary situation and I'm really surprised, with the weight of the backer board and the tile, that they haven't gone through the floor already, because I think one of the only things holding up that shower floor area is the drain that's connected right in the middle, and I'm thinking the drain may be strapped to a good floor, joist, and they're at the mercy of that, so we're going to fix them right up.
Speaker 1:Good. Nothing feels better than spending the money to get somebody to fix it correctly. I got to put pictures up of this stuff, man. Oh yes, please do, cause people think that they're all alone, it's only me, it's only my house. No, everybody has these problems.
Speaker 1:This is Carolina contractor show. The question is DIY or PRO. Should you do it yourself to fix a problem or call a pro AC? We'll be using it more as the weather warms up and you notice it's blowing warm. There's a couple of things you can do.
Speaker 1:We are big proponents of changing your filters. It's easy to find the size, find where they are, take care of it yourself. You could put it on, donnie. You used to do the auto send, where Amazon would send them automatically and you knew when you got them in the mail. You could take care of it. But you can just go to the local big box store and get filters. Change those out. Check your thermostat. My upstairs thermostat malfunctioned and died. I put it in originally but I didn't feel like doing it again because it's kind of a spaghetti mess and I just didn't have the patience for it. My guy put it in for 90 bucks, including the thermostat. I got a basic replacement programmable digital thermostat. But I didn't want to mess with those wires, cause if I did something wrong my fear was I'd somehow shoot a current backup, my AC motor and blow it out and I'd be out, you know, two, three grand to fix it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, now that's a good call. That HVAC is one of those things where it takes a highly skilled tech to do it and do it right the troubleshooting part of it. Even more importantly than that, I have a neighbor who is the guru. He knows more. He forgot more about heating and air than I'll ever know, and it's. It's really that kind of situation and he's one of the smartest people I know period. So when he comes in there he's got to know a little bit about heating and air, he's got to know about electrical and with all the advancements in the HVAC world now he's got to stay on top of all that.
Speaker 2:So it's one of those deals where, if he had his way, everybody would just sell a straight up 14 sear heat pump because they're easy to work on, you don't have to deal with the multi-stage, no zoning boards and the systems just aren't all that complicated. But now you've got geothermal, you've got solar tying into this that you've got to account for. It's just so many other factors now that heating and air tech has to take into consideration. But we're big proponents of at least an annual service and at least that, if not a biannual, by saying, when it turns hot to cold, cold to hot. There's so many heating and air companies out there that they normally will work a good deal just to get you on a service contract and somehow they make money. But a lot of those deals are super cheap.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I definitely agree with you on that. I have a service contract. He comes in the spring and the fall and when my thermostat went bad I gave him a call. He came and looked at it, came back the next day, replaced it. A lot of those contracts also include counts on parts, discounts on the service call, putting you first on a service call or moving you up the ladder. He quoted me a new system for downstairs. I don't need it yet, but he quoted me. He said, if you want to be proactive and he came back at just under seven grand with discounts, that's a steal. And develop those relationships of having a guy come in and look at your system and treat it, because they can literally get three, four, five years more out of your system if you let them check it every year.
Speaker 2:I want to add one quick thing to that is saying that if you build a house and it's fairly new say five to seven years old and you have any kind of a problem with the HVAC unit, it's probably still under warranty. With mine I was pretty fresh into my house and I don't know how many years it was, but my compressor, which is the really big ticket item on your heating and air, change out. The compressor was going out and so we looked at it. It was failing. We went ahead and filed a warranty claim and I got a new compressor. Well, that compressor ended up making it a couple more years and it was just glitchy when we looked at it. But catching something under your warranty could save you anywhere from a thousand bucks to $5,000. So definitely one of those deals. If you have a newer system, then get it checked out. Don't sleep on it, because it could cost you a lot of money.
Speaker 1:Let's go to something you might know a thing or two about, donnie. That is going to be roofs. You might see a shingle turned up or a couple of shingles that look like they've done that shift to the side, or maybe it's even a gutter issue. It's not flowing as well. There's DIY projects that you can do with your roof. You have to consider you're going to have to get up on a roof to do it, but I think when we see a couple shingles loose and we think, yeah, yank them out, lift up the one above it, slide the new one under, tack it in, I'm done. And the more I think about that, though, you're going to have to buy a whole bundle of shingles to do it, even if you only need two. There's other things to consider that you might visually improve the look of that couple shingles that are bad, but I'm sure with your experience, donnie, it ain't that simple.
Speaker 2:No, if you're going to do it yourself on a shingle, change out the number one thing you've got to consider is time of year and time of day. So if it's the hot part of summer, then you better do it early in the morning, because those things are already stuck together from being on there for years and if it's a scenario where you've got to pry those apart, you want it to be when it's not 90 degrees. You want to catch it at 60 or 70 first thing in the morning. Another pro tip is check your crawl space. There's a chance that whoever put your roof on left you a half a bundle of shingles or an extra bundle, and most people just throw those right inside the crawl space door. So you may have a perfect match without having to go to the store to do that. And there's a lot.
Speaker 2:To piggyback on what I said or echo rather what I said about the HVAC system. It's good to have roof maintenance because you may have a 30-year shingle, but pipe boots and things that the pipe boots we use now last a lot longer than they used to. But if you have rubber pipe boots they're exposed to the sun, uh, at least half the day and, and you know they're going to dry, rot. So the lifespan of a rubber pipe boots about five years. So that flashings, uh, caulk and indirect sunlight sorry, phone calls galore. That's my dad. Anyway.
Speaker 2:Anything exposed to the sun, especially if you, your house, faces the south, you're going to get a lot of exposure that's going to deteriorate and wear away all your, all your important parts of the roof. So it's one of those things where it's well worth calling somebody in just to check it out. We don't charge anything for an evaluation and when we do go out to make a small repair, we we just have a minimum charge for that. But that minimum charge also includes everything else on the roof, because we kind of look at it like when we come out it's our baby beyond that point. And and if we we come out for a pipe boot and we see that your flashing is is bad and that you have several nails backed out of the ridge cap ridge vent area, then we we put all those nails back, we we do it the right way and we try to make your roof hold out for the lifespan of the shingle. So minimum charge just doesn't include the bare minimum repair. There's a lot to that.
Speaker 1:If you have a question about a DIY project or how to contact SureTopRoofingcom, that's the first way. Go to TheCarolinaContractorcom and let Donnie check your roof and other things that he can do while he's out at your house. I appreciate the endorsement. My man, not a problem and we appreciate you for tuning in and checking out the show. Again, you can find us on YouTube and check all the other social media sites. Just search for the Carolina Contractor and we will see you next week on the Carolina Contractor Show. Thanks everybody. Thanks for listening to the Carolina Contractor Show. Visit thecarolinacontractorcom.