Do It Yourself?
I had to go to the hardware store the other day. Now usually when I go there it’s a bit of an undercover mission. I have been generally banned from home handyman type stores, because apparently power tools are not single use and no man has any need for 6 cordless drills which just need to be charged in order to work for a second time.
These days, it’s not unusual for me to go to the hardware store just for a look around. I know I’m not on my own in going sometimes, just for a sausage sandwich. Whilst I’m not supposed to be contemplating DIY, I’m also not supposed to be eating white bread and fatty sausages either, so you take the good with the bad.
A friend of mine who works as a Doctor in Accident and Emergency says that they have a spike in cases every long weekend, not necessarily from increased alcohol consumption but from increased DIY activity. Clearly bad things happen when you do it yourself.
Anyway, I was walking through the hardware and I saw these do it yourself carpet cleaning machines, they looked a bit like children’s toys. Cute little dinky things, which any child would enjoy playing with.
It amazed me that, with no training and no experience, I was able to rent a machine for a fraction of the cost of having a professional carpet cleaner, clean my carpets. The 12 year old boy who was working there had some vague instructions about water and soap and turn it on and hope for the best.
It reminded me of my two favourite business principles; the first if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. The second, if you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur.
I was also reminded of the rental property I was called to after the tenant had cleaned the carpets themselves with a hire machine from the supermarket. As they hadn’t been trained they didn’t know about the importance of not over wetting the carpet and about rinsing the soap out of the carpets (Chem-Dry don’t use soaps or detergents reducing the propensity for re soiling) they also didn’t know about what happens if you saturate a carpet in the sub tropics, then lock the house up over the weekend.
The cost to professionally clean the carpets may have been in the vicinity of $200.00. The cost of hiring the machine may have been around $100.00. The look on the tenants face when they had to pay to have the carpets re cleaned ($200), after the carpets had been dried ($400) and the mould on the walls treated ($250), well that was priceless.
For Green and Non Toxic Carpet Cleaning, Water Damage Restoration, Carpet Drying, Mould Remediation on the Far North Coast and Northern Rivers call professional carpet cleaners Chem-Dry Far North Coast. It’s often not cheaper to do it yourself.
