DIY Project Scope and Skills Check
Decide what to do yourself and what to hire.
Added October 15, 2026. Written with AI assistance and checked for clarity and placeholders; not reviewed by a lawyer, accountant, clinician or other professional. How these prompts are made
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Help me scope a DIY project honestly. The project: [PROJECT]. My skills and tools: [SKILLS_TOOLS]. Time I can spend: [TIME]. Budget: [BUDGET]. Rules that may apply (rented home, shared walls, building rules): [CONSTRAINTS]. Break the project into tasks and rate each for difficulty, risk, and tools needed on a scale from 1 to 5. Mark tasks that involve electrics, gas, structure, asbestos, or work at height as professional only. Build a table with Task | Difficulty | Risk | Do it myself? | Hire? | Estimated hours (as a range). Add a skills gap list with learning resources described in general terms and the time to learn. Calculate the cost of hiring versus doing for the tasks that are suitable, using only my numbers and placeholders for quotes. Recommend the split and the order of work, and list the permissions to check first. Quality bar: err on the side of caution about safety. Add a worked example of three tasks from an invented bathroom refresh rated in the table: repainting walls (difficulty 2, risk 1, do it myself), replacing a tap (difficulty 3, risk 2, depends on isolation valves, consider hiring), and moving an electrical socket (difficulty 5, risk 5, professional only). Label it an illustration. Add a decision rule for stopping a DIY job midway: stop if I find something unexpected behind a wall, if a tool is not suited, or if the job needs a permission I do not have, and call a professional with photos. Provide a method for estimating the time as a range by multiplying my first estimate by a factor that I set from past projects, and a checklist for the first fifteen minutes of any job (isolate services, protective equipment, clear space). Safety first: flag any step involving electricity, gas, ladders, asbestos or structural changes, and tell me to confirm local permit rules in [JURISDICTION] with the authority before starting.
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