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Comment by antonymoose | Hacker News Reader

You would certainly need to be a serious long-term renter.

I purchased a home with a walk-out basement (brick exterior, cinder block foundation, >80% above grade). As it turned out, the prior owners had pulled a fast one and faked their framing with 1x4s and added no insulation. Our monthly power bills ranged from 400-500$ on a 2,000 sqft home.

I spent most of last year gutting the interior of the basement, framing, plumbing, electrical, insulation (R-13 fiberglass batt insulation), Sheetrock, paint, trim, flooring (laminate @ 2$ per sqft). I spent approximately $10k on this project doing the labor myself.

As a result, my bills are now in the 200-250 range. I had the insulation work done by 01/2025 for context. So, perhaps a new efficient water heater? But any serious work is unlikely to be worth the costs.

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Worst case scenario that’s a 5.5 year ROI. That seems good.

The labor put in would be _at least_ as much as materials, so $20k total cost for this project to lower the bills from $450 to $225 on average.

That puts it roughly at 7.5 year ROI.

How many renters rent a single space for that long? There goes the answer to the article.

It's a great project if it's your forever home, though.

That’s an incredibly low rate for the breadth and depth of work here. I, a homeowner, can do all of this work with no permitting involved and no certification. Were I to hire out to a GC he’s going to sub out to a plumber and electrician at a minimum. Probably also a drywall+paint crew. Maybe they’ll handle trim and flooring? Who knows!

My in-laws, a cost conscious couple, recently had a bathroom remodel. Nothing fancy or Gucci about it. Materials could not have been any more than 10k and reasonably closer to 5k - it was 45k total for the entire job.

I can’t give you an exact man-hours count but it was less than 40 hours of real-time but with 2 or 3 man crews. Let’s ballpark and say 100 man hours.

So you want to gut and finish a basement? That’s far worse than 10k more in my state of South Carolina.

Yes, I was being extremely optimistic with the labor cost. That would really be the lowest possible opportunity cost for the homeowner to do it themselves.

The higher than number goes, the longer the ROI.

Putting in insulation actually has one of the worst ROIs if you outsource the labor.

A bathroom remodel cost me almost $20K 6 or 7 years back. And that was a small bathroom and keeping a couple of cabinets.

More recently I had a kitchen fire that mostly involved redoing the kitchen completely but also involved move-out/in, seal/paint, for the rest of the house and some other things that made sense while everything was ripped up--and that probably ended up >$200K. Insurance covered a lot but I also paid quite a bit out of pocket.

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