Here’s Do It Yourself … on Steroids

Jeff Brown

This is the life of the advanced do-it-yourselfer: Last fall, I found myself putting a heavy 32-foot ladder up to the pitched roof of our new log home outside Bozeman, Mont., to seal the space around a vent pipe.

The view is fantastic up there—a huge sky overhead, the Gallatin Valley spread out below.

But I was petrified on the slippery metal roof. It’s too steep to walk on and I had no safety harness, and no one around to help out or even to notice if it all went wrong. I avoided a slide into oblivion by bracing one foot on the vent pipe and clutching a raised seam between two sheets of metal roofing, working on the pipe with one hand.

I lived to tell the tale, obviously, but I also added this to the list of construction experiences I’ll never repeat, like running a jackhammer. I tried it, though, because if a task can be done, I want to do it myself.

Why? Saving money is one reason, since labor is half the cost when you hire a pro. But the real motivation is the thrill of solving problems and the satisfaction of work done well.

It starts small…

I’ve been working on homes and vehicles for 40 years. I picked up a few building skills from my father when we lived in an old farmhouse in New York’s Westchester County in the 1950s and ’60s, learned more working summers for the local school system as a teenager, and added skills including fence building on an Australian cattle property during a year off from college.

My mom always said, “A man ought to know how to do things,” and despite hating my motorcycle phase, she encouraged the DIY spirit by giving me a set of custom Harley-Davidson wrenches when I rode a Sportster in the early 1980s.

I made a living as a newspaper reporter and columnist for 32 years before turning to freelance writing 10 years ago. I moved to Montana in the spring of 2014, after our son started college and the child-friendly services of the Philadelphia suburbs were no longer required. My wife is still there, living the commuting life. She makes the trip to Montana as often as possible and I get back East sometimes, too. After so many years together, she knows this is me, and the arrangement works well for us.

The Montana house sits on 10 steeply sloping acres at 6,700 feet, facing the sunny southwest and looking down into Bozeman, a sweet college town 10 miles away. We hired an Amish firm to put up the shell and I’ve done the rest.

This house is my masterpiece. But it’s also the culmination of years of learning.

The advanced DIY life generally starts with small projects, and you add tools and skills along the way. It helps that this is a golden age for DIYers, with a book, website or YouTube video for every need. But you’ve crossed the Rubicon when you say the same thing about every job: “I’m not paying someone to do that!” Once you believe you can do anything, you have to do everything.

Well, almost everything. Hard experience has shown me it does sometimes pay to hire a pro, so I had an electrician run the power from the outside box to the circuit breaker box in the basement, gulping at the price. And although I’ve done lots of asphalt roofing, I hired a pro to put the metal roof on this house, because it’s so steep and requires specialized equipment and more knowledge than I could get from YouTube.

Doubts and exultation

Around here no one bats an eye when I tell them what I’m up to.

We broke ground in May of 2014 and the shell was done early that August. I wanted to move in Sept. 1, and in late August it snowed when I was cutting slate for the hearth. It was freezing and I was soaked from the mist coming off the saw’s water-cooled blade. “What have I gotten myself into?” I thought.

But warm weather returned a few days later. I was up here on my own, free of The Man, making a dream come true—though I was sleeping on the floor in a room full of moths and bats because not all the windows were in. I cooked on a camp stove. The shower and toilet were in the basement, which was icy even after I’d put in the heat pump.

One thing the author did not do himself: build the shell of the house. He hired an Amish firm to do it.

Jeff Brown

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