RBOMoney (mostly staining the deck)

• For Nibling 1’s Christmas present, DH’s brother suggested sending him money instead of directly to Nibling 1 because he’s buying a Valve Steam Deck game system for Nibling 1.  Apparently it is like a really expensive switch, or a really cheap PC in the shape of a portable gaming system.  In any case, it’s expensive.  So I guess we’ll be buying ~1/9th of one.  This seems reasonable to us!
• We tried to hire a handyman to stain our deck for us.  Whenever we do it ourselves, we regret the time and effort spent and wish we’d paid someone.  But finding someone to do it is difficult.  We will find someone we like and they’ll do all sorts of stuff for us and then they will just disappear when we try to find them a year or two later.
• Professional painting companies charge a lot if you just want them to come out for the deck.  I’m not sure why, because you’d think they’d be able to do it the cheapest since they own and know how to use all of the equipment and have trained people doing it.  But even the people who charge reasonable prices for indoors seem to charge crazy prices for decks.  It may be that it’s just too small a job to be worth it to them.  Apparently when we were getting our inside house painted before we went on leave one year, they did the deck for just $600, so that would track with the having it be part of a larger job.
• Last time (two years ago) we needed a few boards replaced and we were getting our fence replaced already, so we paid the same people to fix and stain our deck.  It was not cheap, but I remember feeling like it was probably worth it.  I don’t know how much the deck part cost, but the entire bill including some crazy brickwork stuff for our fence was $5400.
• DH has replaced boards before and done a good job with it, but even just staining the deck takes a couple of days.  New boards is a two person job over several days.  First you measure and cut.  Then you take the old ones out and put the new ones in and hammer gun them.  Then you have to wait a few days or some amount of time that may even be longer.  Then you wash the deck.  Then you wait for it to dry out and for the weather to be nice.  Then you stain a coat.  Then you wait a day or two and stain another coat.  Then you go over the new boards.  If you don’t wait long enough you end up with sap or something bubbling up through the paint, and then that part of the paint scrapes off.
• It looks like back in 2020 we also had to replace boards.  That cost was $1126, which we thought was reasonable.
• In 2018, DH did it himself because we gave up finding someone.
• This time though, we just needed cleaning and two coats of stain. We tried a new handyman that one of my colleagues recommended and he said $1300.  Now, inflation has been high, but it hasn’t been that high.  Inflation, in fact, suggests the cost should be something like $750.  I was expecting something around $800, and almost certainly under $1000.
• We have to rent all sorts of stuff from Home Depot, which some handymen have to do and some don’t.  But even so… $1300 really does seem high for just cleaning and painting.  Unless there’s been huge amounts of inflation in the cost of stain, but I somewhat doubt that.  The internet suggests that the high-end of deck staining across the country should be around $1,250, and we’re generally not in the high end for house work given the lower cost of living around here.
• Presumably there’s someone who could stain our deck for a more reasonable amount, but finding that person will be non-trivial.  We had asked around but only gotten this one lead.
• So, we have given up on finding someone and DH and DC1 scrubbed the deck and bought stain yesterday (~4 person-hours, or 2 hours total with both of them working) .  He opted not to powerwash or to use fancy painting equipment this time (I guess we still have the flat push paint applier from before), so the total materials cost is under $200, though of course there will be labor costs, and we’re never quite as good at not getting a little stain on the walls no matter how carefully we tape.  Maybe two years from now we’ll be more successful finding someone to do it for us, but for now I guess we’ll be saving $1,100 in exchange for our own labor.

Do you have a handyperson?  How do you get big projects around the house done?