Youtube Videos That Can Save You Money on Home Repair

by the author of What School Should Have Taught You: 75 Skills You’ll Actually Use in Life

Owning a place is expensive. If you feel like you’re spending half of your paycheck on handymen to fix things for you on a regular basis, then know that there are steps that you can take yourself that will likely save you a chunk of change. This is where Youtube comes in. There are Youtube videos that can save you money at your house.

With a little bit of DIY spirit, you can save yourself a chunk of change.

Here are a few that I recommend and why…

How to repair a broken door jamb for an interior door

When it comes to fixing things, Home Mender is probably my favorite channel out there. For starters, he reminds me of another goofy handyman that I know. Secondly, he’s great at what he does. I’ve used his videos to successfully fix problems before, and he does a great job of explaining how to do things, even the little stuff. The little stuff is important. There are often little steps with fixing things that you need to know about but that a lot of people take for granted and don’t teach.

His videos are “real,” taking place out in the field rather than being manufactured on a stage so that he can pitch you a certain type of screw or something like that, too. Your house is “real” too, so that’s another good reason to check out what this guy has to say.

If you have a door jamb that one kid broke while trying to get his brother to give him back his phone so that he wouldn’t look at his girlfriend’s texts, then this video can help. Well, with fixing the jamb, anyway.

This is a fairly simple fix if you have a nail gun. Otherwise, if you call the pro, you’re looking at a service trip fee (probably $50), the parts cost (probably $25), and then roughly an hour or two of labor. You could end up with a bill for around $150.

How to fix holes in your drywall

If you just moved into a new place, have kids, or run an Air BnB, you need to know how to patch holes in drywall. It’s a fairly simple process, and I’ve never seen any reason to pay somebody else to do it for me. The only exception here would be if it’s an absolutely massive hole that you’re not sure what to do with.

For the smaller stuff, you shouldn’t have a problem. I normally use Fast N’ Final, some type of little flat scraper device, and really fine grit sandpaper. This above video will save you from having to hire a guy to come to your place and do it all for you. There are types of drywall repair goop that dry pretty quickly, but if you only have a few holes that need to be fixed, you’re still going to be paying for that fixer man to sit at your place and play on his phone while the stuff dries.

You can buy what you need here for right around $15. If you pay a handyman to come and do it for you, his service trip fee alone is going to be twice that amount.

How to paint a wall

I was fortunate enough to have my mom teach me how to paint walls while growing up. That was the running joke in my family, “Oop, it’s a new week. What room do we need to paint, Mom?” I think she just liked looking at the paint swatches at Lowe’s because I vividly remember spending an inordinate amount of time of my childhood standing there.

What followed was hours of helping Mom paint. A lot of people haven’t had that experience, though, and when it comes to painting a room in their house, they quickly discover that it’s not as simple as they originally thought. If you want things to look right and not like they were done by a 3rd grader with a brush, then I recommend checking out the above video.

This will teach you the bulk of what you need to know so that you don’t find yourself frustrated after having attempted to paint something by yourself and then calling a painter to fix it all.

Painters are expensive, and for good reason – painting sucks. There are a lot of steps that you need to know about, and you have to take your time when you’re painting something if you want it to look like it was done by somebody who cares.

For a 15’x15’ room, I’ve spent about $20-$40 on primer, $75 on paint, $20 on brushes, $30 on a roller with its tubes, $20 on a roller tray and plastic inserts, $15 on quality blue painter’s tape (quality matters here), and $15-$30 on drop cloth material. You can see that things rapidly add up when it comes to painting, and paint is not cheap. Now add to that the cost of labor for a painter to come to your place 2-3 times to paint everything. You’re talking about a sizable chunk of change.

The above video will help you to keep that labor fee in your pocket.

How to fix holes in a door frame

Older homes tend to be an absolute mess. You can purchase them for a song, but they always require a lot of repair, and for some reason, people 80-100 years ago didn’t really have any rhyme or reason when they did things with building homes. They just thought “this’ll work,” and then created some type of Rube Goldberg fix.

Ask anybody with an older home. They’ll agree with me here.

If you’re the one who just moved into an older home and have found that your door frames are littered with holes where it looks like the century of previous owners decided to let their pet woodpeckers play, you know that this not only looks disgusting, but it can actually interfere with the door’s function as well. Screws will come loose in the strike plates of your locks, and you may not even be able to get the door to lock as a result.

Once again, Home Mender has an excellent fix here that will only cost you a few bucks. Strongman goop, red solo cups, and a putty scraper. That’s all you need to fix those unsightly holes (if it is the actual strike plate, you’re probably going to have to do a bit of drilling after the fact, too).

A handyman is just going to do the same thing, and his service trip fee alone will easily surpass what you would pay for material here.

How to fix a rubbing door

Rubbing doors are absolutely obnoxious. You can pay a guy to come through your house and fix all of them, or you can do it yourself. The guy in this video focuses on bending the hinges back to where they align better, using nothing more than a shim and an adjustable wrench.

In my experience, I’ve found that it’s always a good idea to check the hinges’ screws first. Just within the past week, I discovered that the reason my pantry door was acting strange was that the screws at the top hinge were only 1” long and had been pulled out of the wall. I pulled them out and put 3” screws in instead. No more squeaking or rubbing since.

The same thing happened at a family member’s house the other day. His front door was acting strange. The screws in the top hinge were way too short and had been pulled out of their holes. New screws in there would fix everything.

It’s not uncommon for a guy to charge you $20 per door that he repairs for rubbing doors. That’s not including the service trip fee either (yes, you do have to pay a guy to drive 30 minutes out to your house). With the above video, though, you should be able to do this with minimal equipment.

DIY with what you can

Obviously, you can’t DIY everything. But there are a lot of things around the house that you can repair if you have the will, the tools, and a little bit of know-how. Hopefully, being directed to the above videos will help you with saving a bit of money at your place this week.

Thoughts? Are there any specific home repairs you’ve learned to do by using YouTube? Do you have a particular channel you recommend for DIY instructions? Let us know in the comments section!

About Aden

Aden Tate is a regular contributor to TheOrganicPrepper.com and TheFrugalite.com. Aden runs a micro-farm where he raises dairy goats, a pig, honeybees, meat chickens, laying chickens, tomatoes, mushrooms, and greens. Aden has four published books, What School Should Have Taught You, The Faithful Prepper,  An Arm and a Leg, The Prepper’s Guide to Post-Disaster Communications, and Zombie Choices. You can find his podcast The Last American on Preppers’ Broadcasting Network.