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Comment by throwway120385 | Hacker News Reader

throwway120385

I thought the "House Building" one would include things like wiring, plumbing, drywall, mudding & taping, texturing, painting, finish carpentry, framing/formbuilding(rough carpentry), concrete, flooring, and so on. Instead it's more about doing feasability and stuff. The Renovation & Repair one lumps a lot of discrete skill sets together and maybe leaves a lot of stuff up to "experts."

A lot of these "skill sets" have fractal complexity, where if you dig in on "Concrete work" you'll find yourself going down a rabbit hole of form building, hydrostatic pressure, foundation squaring, and so on. Even pouring an unreinforced slab for a patio requires some distinct skills. Plumbing is the same way where being able to replace a water heater could devolve into sweating new fittings.

Is the intent here to document what you could do without knowing what the residential code is and how to pull permits in your area?

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I would assume that you are not a carpenter: As a carpenter, I would include: Knowledge of Universal Building Codes, knowledge of local building codes, Local code checklists, Blue print reading, Site survey reading, and first hand knowledge of your local building department. (AHJ)

Concrete forms, soil management, concrete testing, that is more than a rabbit hole, its a whole immense specialty. ( Ask Richard Sloan, who literally taught me how to finish concrete like glass... over very large areas. )

Tiling is deep also. ( Thanks Alejandro ).

Even after more than 10 years work, texturing as a skill is still beyond me, and like far beyond me.

Your point is well taken, but...

This is an amazingly LARGE amount of work.

Environmental skill?I cannot wait to see this one:

I should make a Building a Desktop PC, Coaching, Transform your life. Truck Driving and Taking no sh*.

>Tiling is deep [...] texturing is a skill beyond me.

Interesting. Sounds like you have way more experience than me, but I feel pretty comfortable doing tiling and do a decent job, after doing a kitchen floor, backsplash, bathroom floor, and shower. The biggest risk with doing tiling is once you learn how to do it, you'll start noticing bad tiling jobs everywhere. Particularly lippage.

I've also done decent jobs of texturing the couple attempts I've done. I don't love them, if I stare at them I think they look terrible but if I'm walking past I don't notice them. What in car racing they'd call a 50/50 paint job: looks good from 50 feet when it's going 50MPH. :-) But, what I'm starting to do, and what I did on my bathroom remodel, is doing a level 5 finish. It took me a while to get to where I was happy, but not having to texture and instead just painting the untextured wall came out pretty nice. I guess it's more common in "the west" to texture and level 5 in "the east" (USA).

Perfection is just making sure any flaws are smaller than the observer's perceived level of detail.

> you'll start noticing bad tiling jobs everywhere

To me, that's the crux of it. There are structural and system jobs (load bearing carpentry, electrical, plumbing) and there's everything else (tiling, painting, countertops, cabinetry, etc).

If you screw up the latter... it looks bad, and that's about the end of it.

Which is to say, give it a go. Most people, with the proper investment of time and care, can do a better-than-contractor job on non-code/permit type work, simply by virtue of caring about it more.

>simply by virtue of caring about it more.

There is a lot of power in caring about your work. My philosophy is: Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Contractors can't affordably overdo their work, generally. They need to bang it out and get on to the next one. Their experience lets them work faster, but their budget limits the level of work they can do.

Plus, I love the level of knowledge it gives me about the house. For example, when our drier started blowing the breaker every load, I was comfortable enough to open the panel and take a peek and notice that one of the legs on the breaker was heat damaged, and the breaker was cracked, and that leg wasn't torqued down very well. Cut off the damaged wire, replaced the breaker, and I'm back in business. And that work was done by a pro 7 years ago.

>what you could do without knowing what the residential code is and how to pull permits in your area?

Don't let permits stop you. I'm sure it varies from location to location, but our city permit office is crazy helpful to DIYers, and it makes sense: making it easy for DIYers to get permits and inspections is a huge win for safety in the long run.

I love having the "backstop" of an inspection to find any problems I have, and the inspectors have all been extremely nice. And for my tub drain, it was in a confined area that was really hard to work the necessary pieces in, the general inspector called in a plumbing inspector who called in a master plumber before we could get it worked out so that I didn't end up with an S-trap.

Literally three people to do a tub waste, wow, btw just about every tub waste is in a confined area where it's hard to work the necessary pieces in. That is the nature of tub wastes.

The point being: Having the inspection prevented me from having an S-trap that I likely would have had if I or a plumber had done it without inspection. In my case it was particularly tough because I had the floor joists, cross bracing 2 water pipes, and another 2x4 to negotiate, while the drain was moved over 2 inches from where the original was. It was doable, but was great to have a master plumber verify my final solution wasn't an S-trap.

The Housbuilding one is like

1. half “you build it yourself”, and

2. half “have someone else build it but you make the plan”

I don’t get who the audience for it is.

You’re supposed to start at the bottom too but the order is kind of all over the place.

Link to the house building one for anyone interested: https://github.com/sjpiper145/MakerSkillTree/blob/main/House...

I assume it's just a bingo card. So it is used to tell you your skills and possibly guide you to other skills, but not meant as a curriculum. It tells you who you are, not what you should be.

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