Do you have any foresty bits on your acre? That's honestly peak luxury in some ways. Person I mentioned in the previous comment has a forested knoll with a great view, but enough tree cover that you can avoid the sun.

Fixing things up on your own truly is magical. I do it with cars more than my home (because the former is often cheaper and quicker and I buy cheap-ass formerly-luxury beaters usually), but this summer I have some plans for my house as well.

[–] neomachino@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Oh we do, we have a little bit of woods, but right next to us there's about a 20 acre thick woods that's owned by one of our neighbors and basically treated as communal. A couple of the neighbors help out to maintain a trail that they made running next to a small stream. We just found out the whole woods is filled with various flowers in the spring/summer. Right now all the daffodils are absolutely covering everything but the trail so the owners posted on Facebook inviting anyone to come walk the trail and pick as many as they want. It was really cool to see so many people from the community come to this private land that's treated as public, maintained for free by the neighbors just for the sake of having something nice, to pick flowers for free without any expectation of anything in return. Talk about icing in the cake, we had no clue about any of this before we moved in. I assumed it was a grumpy old guy who like living in the woods so people wouldn't bother him, instead it's a young couple with a baby who invite strangers in for tea.

I tried fixing up cars a couple years back but it turns out that's just not my jam. I was a framing carpenter for a few years so my expertise outside of wood and nails is pretty limited. But with the price of things nowadays I'm getting not too shabby with plumbing and electrical. Replaced a couple pipes when we first moved in and I'm working on slowly swapping out some old knob and tube with romex, although it takes me forever because I'll check everything 20, times and redo it if it's not absolutely perfect, electrical stuff makes me nervous.

[–] cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago

I tried fixing up cars a couple years back but it turns out that's just not my jam. I was a framing carpenter for a few years so my expertise outside of wood and nails is pretty limited.

I grew up on a farm and one of The good things about it is, that no matter what, you will be forced to learn at least the basics of quite a lot of different fields of manual work. I van comfortably handle quite a lot of stuff and would be able to fix a lot of stuff by myself, because I learned all the basics while fixing stuff with my dad (or by myself). As long as long AS i dont have to fix anything at a car (or any other bigger vehicle) or do any electrical work that is more complex than changing an electric component (as in ripping out the old component and replacing it with an identical new component) I am quite comfortable, that I could do quite a lot stuff by myself (if I have the right tools for it).

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago

Cars are easy, but you'll need adequate diagnostics solutions much of the time. And you'll want to avoid cars from areas where they tend to rust. Rust is harder to deal with than engine or even auto transmission issues lol

But if you're not into it, it's harder to learn it and it'll be a fruitless endeavour.