Shocked at the cost of tradesman

You can’t compare rates as an employee with rates as self employed.

You don't think you can't be sued if you install faulty electrics. Most routine legal advice and conveyancing is done by para legals who haven't trained for years. Conveyancing, divorce, probate. Most of it is routine. Note I'm saying routine not LA law.
Don't fall for the narrative that a posh office indicates some higher plane of intellectual superiority. That's what they want you to think.
And there numerous examples of poor legal representation without consequences for the legal profession. Creating the mystic is how they over charge for their service.

Why oh why oh why did I bother going to uni for 3 years and training in a profession to be paid less per hour than your gardener 😰

Unless you are very proficient, don't be tempted to do it your self. It's a false economy. If you can't afford to have it all done then stagger it until you can or look to finance it. If you try to do it, it will drag on for ages, you'll get stressed and it won't be the finish you want. Best to get a second job with the time you would be doing it and pay a pro with the extra cash you earn.

As the partner of a tradesman offer him cash and he'll reduce the cost.

25 pounds an hour for a self-employed person who has to buy tools, a van, fuel, insurance; who has no holiday, sick pay or pension - that's probably not even the equivalent of minimum wage. And these are skilled jobs.

What nonsense. You need to study for many years to give legal advice and if you are wrong you are negligent and can be sued.

People pay 100 an hour for routine legal advice or basic conveyancing and think it's OK because it's professional advice. It no more skilled than a trade person carrying out work.

Yup!

I had friends crowing about how their polish builders would work till the wee hours of the morning and sleep at their empty homes which were being renovated and then complaining bitterly that they can't get this kind of service anymore. Meanwhile they are dragging their heels at, brace for the horror, being asked to go back to work in the office. Without a lick of humility.

You think all those Polish builders spent years studying at apprenticeships?? 😆

I certainly wouldn't pay someone who I considered a muppet £400/day. That's for sure.

Funny how paying the going rate for talent should somehow not apply to trades...

All of the knowledge in the world is at your fingertips. Can you not do these jobs for yourself?

You can acknowledge both things, you know... The UK’s structural neglect of training and the value that migrant workers brought. Now they’re gone, we’re stuck paying £300-400 a day to entitled muppets for shoddy, half-arsed work and still expected to be grateful they turned up.

That sounds around the going price. I paid £250 for a bedroom ceiling to be painted White Matt, took him 2 hours for 2 coats. Not a big room either, done the rest myself but ceilings are too much for me now, but the price was average for the job.

It sounds around normal for the SE. 🤷‍♀️

Why would that be? What it suggests to me is that there will be increasing numbers of people who will enter trades and offer lower prices. AI does remove some jobs, but it will push people into others, creating a more competitive market for trades.

Yeah, AI will do for a lot of lecturers, but people will still need their houses plastered and painted...

I agree. We're rapidly heading back to where people with manual/trade related skills will be the ones with the good jobs and higher earners as they can do the things that most people can't. Improvements in tech and AI etc will indeed mean that there's less need for teaching knowledge/facts as you're right in that all the facts you'll ever need will be readily available from your mobile phone. That just leaves scientific advances which will still be needed via a new hybrid form of scientists working WITH tech and AI to design/develop and than manual skilled people to make things alongside AI.

Yo do realise that painting is a necessary trade, paint protects the render and substrate of buildings, the increase in pay reflects that and also the shortage of trained painters. And aesthetics are worth quite a lot to society, spend some time in any former soviet state and you will quickly appreciate the value of "decoration".

Knowledge is becoming worthless now that we have smartphones in our pockets. The perfection of A.I, which is less than a decade away, will make knowledge a worthless commodity. And neither you nor any other person will be employed to train anybody, let alone the "whatevers" of the future.

Clearly society thinks not! And that’s not how it was even 20 years ago. The value of my salary has collapsed in comparison to that of a painter (who, frankly is NOT useful to society - decorating is a lovely thing but it’s not a societally useful thing!).

so yes, I made a poor choice. And one consequence is the collapse in thr quality of our education system, as its becoming the case that only people w a chunk of inherited money (eg to put into a house) can teach in universities.

it does say a lot about what people value that a hairdresser earns more than someone who teaches the doctors of the future.

skim and paint walls -£3k to £5k. - Seems too cheap to me and in the NE. I would expect the pay 5k for plastering and another 3k to the decorator.

Look away anyone related to a builder but ime they are overpriced and unreliable.

Laying laminate is a skilled job, if you don't want weird joins or bumps in it. Plaster skimming is also skilled.

Looking forward to you telling us how it went when you DIYed it, OP!