$600 = 1 Vacation Day

I spent an entire vacation day about 10 hours replacing a column that is at the entrance to the back door of our house. The column was rotted. When I hit the column with the car backing up just prior to going on vacation caused this job to become highest priority house repair that we needed to get done. We originally got estimates to replace the column at $600. A real carpenter likely could replace the column in 1/2 that time because he has real tools. Compared to my toy jig saw. He also knows what he is doing. The question is whether or not it is worth giving up 1 vacation day to save $600? If I could use the $400 dollars in labor to buy a lens the answer would be yes. But if we did that we would probably go broke given all the projects we have done on the weekends.

Thank god I have caulking skills because my lack of carpentry skills created some serious gaps in the finished column cap woodwork that needed to be filled. Overall my wife was impressed with the work unfortunately... As a result she now has the confidence in me to do even higher complexity home repair jobs :-( I'll post a picture once it stops raining.