To think that tradesmen take the piss with their rates?

What annoys me is how so many refuse to utilise what you’ve got and will only rip out entire bathrooms and charge you £10k for a new bathroom when it isn’t needed. It’s so bad for the environment and pocket. In frustration my husband now follows YouTube and does it himself. Rewiring spot lights, redoing silicone, fixing taps, skirting board etc. it costs a fraction of the price, looks better and is better for the environment.

If it's not worth it to you, don't pay it 🤷🏻‍♀️

Hairdressers, chefs, mechanics - they all train for a long time to do whatever in an hour that most people can't do. I respect their skills and hire people I trust to do whatever I need done. Just like accountants and lawyers and all the other things that happen - it's not an hour in a vacuum, it's the result of years of training.

My daughter is in high school and I'm very much encouraging her to take a wide view on what she's like to do in the future. There are so many options besides university.

I pay £55 per hour for my handyman. I make sure to call him when I’ve got a few jobs lined up. They are always small (easy to the right person) jobs that would take me ages. Last time he put up some blinds, 2 shelves and fixed my dishwasher in an hour. I’d have probably spent 5 hours doing those jobs badly. It’s not his fault he’s efficient and fast!

I've saved a fortune over the years by learning how to do stuff myself (I was lucky - my dad taught me most things and gave me the confidence to try).

It's well worth learning these skills.

a good, reliable tradesman is a very valuable thing to have though!

I totally support their salaries they deserve them entirely, I could never do it full time! I v nearly killed myself over the stress of renovating this house, and am not moving any time soon again. Unfortunately theres a lot of rouge/awful ones locally despite using trust a trade reviews, that we just became petrified to look for people after a few ysars. Found an amazing tiler and carpet fitter and recommend them to everyone. After 3 plasterers I finally found one that didn't leave the wall a total state needing hours of sanding and filling, thankfully as we wouldn't have managed to plaster the hallway!

Just saying on £23ph as a Dr (I'm 10y qualified so not a newbie) I couldn't afford the costs of most things, hence self taught absolutely anything we hand any hopes of doing (fitted new bath/sink/loo as just replaced like for like, many test runs of turn the mains on, still leaking, mains off, try again haha oh it gives me nightmares!

Seems fine to me. I use tradesmen all the time

You should get a price in advance, then if you think it's too much go elsewhere. Good trades are in high demand, it's going to get worse, so.if you find a good one look after them.

This in spades

6 hours work putting up some shelves, a small area of tiling and replacing skirting boards. He arrived at 10, left at 12 for lunch, back at 2 then was finished by 4pm.

He sounds pretty skilled and efficient if he could do all that in 4 hours. You're paying for a job well done.

It's strange he didn't want to use his own tools, you'd think a tradesperson gets used to their own things.

Cash in hand. I don't get morally involved in why they're asking for cash.

You should always get a quote.

In response to your query - my year 11 son is considering learning a trade rather than A levels. Anyone we've mentioned it to has been very enthusiastic about how much work he'll have and how he'll be financially secure way sooner than his peers who go to uni etc.

Next time, get a quote. £475 to have all that done is a lot, and particularly £75 to replace a pull light string is absurd.
You Tube is your friend to show you how to make minor repairs.

usually leaky toilet valves just need the flapper valve replacing. It can take a little while to diagnose, so 45 minutes isn’t too bad for the time it takes to diagnose.

OP, I was a university professor before I retired, and I learned how to do this stuff myself..paint rooms, hang shelves, refinish floors, put in toilet mechanisms, do basic tiling. Saved me a mint. Teaching as a whole doesn’t pay that well.

That said, I will hire a skilled person to do things like make hardwood windows to replace rotten ones…he’s coming next week to replace our bargeboards….I suppose I could have had some boards cut and hired a cherry picker, but I’m getting a little old for those heights.

Good luck

If I had my time again I would! I knew a plumber who earned £90 a hour for emergencies back in the mid nighties. I asked how he could justify that and he said ‘if water is pishing through your ceiling at 11pm you’ll pay me £90 to stop it!’

Had a lot of work done recently and those are really good rates by my reckoning.

The alternative is to learn how to do it yourself, spend a shedload on decent tools (which you then need to be able to store) and even if you know what you are doing, unless you do it every day, it will always take you 3-5x longer to do it yourself. We have a couple of tradesmen that we use for absolutely everything now. Quicker, looks professional and saves me listening to my DH swearing all weekend (or having a row when he critiques me doing the job).

I'm not sure why the OP thinks her teaching degree is any more important than the qualifications a tradesman has but there you go.

I am so glad DH and I learnt how to do a lot of the basic DIY jobs ourselves from our parents and then made sure DC's were involved whenever we did DIY jobs ourselves so can now do much of their own work.
Perhaps the finish may not be as good as a professional and may take longer but it is not always easy to find someone you can rely on. Some of the rental properties that DCs have lived in have been atrocious and these have been described as newly refurbished - looks pretty but can only be described as all fur coat and no knickers.

Please don’t degrade a skill because they didn’t go to university.
My husbands trade took 5 years being on the tools as an apprentice to learn. At least, if he went for an interview and was up against someone with the same degree qualification he would know his arse from his elbow and how to use a spanner.

@Pomegranatecarnage those rates don't sound too bad to me. The only issue was the cash in hand aspect but you don't know if it was declared or not and probably shouldn't make that assertion.

Rather than listing what tradesman have to do around their jobs as so many others have, I'm going to focus on yiur employment benefits paid in addition to your salary:

Pension - 28.9% employer contribution
Death in service benefits - very generous
Sick Pay - very generous, probably 6 months full, six months half
Holiday pay - generous allowance compared to statutory 28 days
Mat pay - variable
Regular monthly income
Working mostly in the warm

One thing I don't understand is yiur tutoring rate. DD is only 26 and teaches secondary English. She is turning down tutoring jobs and has a waiting list. The going rate is £75 for 45 minutes. I'm also surprised by her salary which is more than I thought it would be.

Good luck with this post OP. I posted something similar a while ago and the comments were plain nasty. I'm not sure what people get out of demonstrating their pug faced stupidity online but there you go, it's the modern world.

Seems to me the issue really is that OP didn't get a 'mate's rate' from the neighbour.

Love how you acknowledge prep time for an hours tutoring but not all the not unpaid time for tradesmen ie admin, collecting supplies, travel and quotes etc.

If it was easy to learn and complete these tasks to a high standard there would be less demand.

£270 for tiling, shelves and skirting seems like a bargain. If you wanted the moral high ground re cash in hand you should have chosen someone else and paid full price.

There was no quote

That's on you then, if you don't shop around there's a chance you'll be ripped off (not that I'm saying you were overcharged in this case).

I pay my cleaner more per hour than I earn myself, despite the fact that I have a university degree and they don’t.

Those are their rates, I want their service, I don’t want to do it myself and so I pay it. They do an amazing job and I appreciate and value them.

We only pay for things we definitely can't do eg complex plumbing, electrical and gas work. People who do that work are skilled and have a lot of overheads. Yes there are plenty of crap ones, like any profession (including teaching) however once you get a reliable one they're ace.

Everything else we do ourselves - painting, putting up shelves, tiling etc. I use YouTube and other sites.

We need more young people to go into trades, attitudes like yours are part of the reason they aren't.

I am a senior scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, I spent over a decade at ancient universities doing degrees and post docs before I moved to the pharmaceutical industry. I'm sure @Pomegranatecarnage can accept I am highly educated.
We do contract work for other pharma companies and they get charged many multiples of my headline salary for my time. Why? Because of all the overheads that surround what I do. The NI, pensions, tax, buildings and heating and cleaning, the equipment and maintenance, all the non-customer facing staff that do vital work. I am just the tip of the iceberg of the costs associated with the work we do. And that's not taking into account the scarcity of my skills and the premium people pay to work with me. Tradesmen are no different in that respect, they just have less job security and fewer employment perks.

I really get fed up of people with very secure public sector jobs with stonking pensions who think they are hard done to because they can't tell the difference between the rate tradepeople charge and the money they take home.

Do you factor in your employers' pension contributions in your figures?

How about the earnings you're losing when you spend time learning and doing trades work when you could have been working in your own jobs and earning money?

You really can't compare a wage against the charges of someone self employed. It's like comparing apples and a brick!

£270 for 6 hours is cheap. It’s basically a full day’s work including travel, admin and sourcing materials.
Can I have the name of your tradesman please?