What It’s Been Like Fixing Houses As A Car Mechanic

In what feels like a flash, I met my wife, got married, had a child, and now instead of being a single dude wrenching on badass Jeeps, I’m a domesticated suburbanite whose projects are mostly house projects. As someone with zero experience fixing houses and 15 years of experience fixing largely rusty cars, I wasn’t sure how my skills would translate. Well, I just replaced a furnace blower, designed and built a deck, designed a bathroom (!) and have lots more projects coming; what have I learned is that not nearly all of my skills translate over.

Wrenchers wrench. If you’re someone who calls yourself a wrencher, then you can probably fix anything, whether it’s a car or a house or a plastic flower garland (a (fake) flower fell off my wedding garland, so I used a lighter and melted its stem back on — my wife was impressed!).

Wrenching is a beautifully-transferable problem-solving mindset that applies to so many elements of one’s life. Upon discovering that something isn’t working, you analyze the system to figure out how the component works, you establish the failure modes, and you determine which potential repair is the most optimal given constraints. Working on cars has been a huge player in getting me to where I am today, professionally, and it’s something I think everyone should at least try.

So I figured I’d be able to do a bunch of home repairs on my wife’s townhouse to save us a bit of money, as contractors are expensive. I was mostly right, but it wasn’t easy because houses are quite different than cars.

Houses Are Not Nearly The Precision Instruments Cars Are   

The first thing I noticed was that, relative to cars, houses are built really poorly. Maybe “poorly” isn’t the exact word, but the precision and quality of the components in a car — even the worst car on the market today — are so much higher than those of a house.

Take wiring for example. I repaired our house’s furnace blower the other month, and my god — the wires were all over the place, held in by wiggling connectors and wire nuts; it was terrible.

Even on an old car from the 1940s, the wiring is cleaner than this, and that’s for a number of reasons:

1. Cars have to endure lots of dynamic motion and a variety of weather conditions
2. Cars have to be mass-produced, whereas each house is its own thing
3. Cars are generally designed to be serviced more often than homes

As a result, cars have beautiful nylon connectors, sometimes with silicone gaskets built in. The wires are often part of a nice, clean harness/loom, and everything is nicely color-coded in a way that can be easily deciphered with a Hayne’s Manual.

And that’s just the wiring. Look at the mechanical bits of any car, and everything is beautifully stamped/forged/cast, and every part is perfectly interchangeable/standardized. You simply remove an old part, put a new one on following instructions, and bob’s your uncle.

Houses — especially old ones — are just not anywhere on the same level. I mean, look at the ductwork coming from this furnace!:

Some of that difference in perceived quality owes itself to materials.

The Materials Are Totally Different

Cars are generally made of steel, aluminum, or carbon fiber, whereas homes are made of wood, concrete, plaster, and stone. These materials are way, way different than one another, and because of this, I found that working on homes — while still wrenching, technically — is a markedly different overall experience than working on cars, and only really requires an actual wrench for a few jobs (like plumbing).

For example, I had to pour some concrete for my deck, and I’ll be honest: I had no clue how to do it. I didn’t know how deep I had to dig, I didn’t know I had to put gravel at the bottom of the hole, I didn’t know what concrete to use, I wasn’t sure how to make it look good, I wasn’t sure how long to let it cure before installing anchors — it was all new. In fact, it was so new that, when the contractor came in to actually weld my deck (since that job was too much for me), he just redid the pour using a nice concrete form:

The composite wood on top of the deck was also a new material, as — aside from maybe a Morgan or an old Model T or a bus — wood is largely absent from from the car world. I’d never before used a nail while wrenching on a car (obviously I’ve hammered nails before, but just not in cars), and while I had used self-tapping screws similar to the ones I used on my deck, generally in the car world it’s frowned upon to use anything other than a bolt for a mechanical connection (you’ll find some screws on interior trim).

There are some subsystems of a home that feel similar in nature to a car; for example, plumbing can sometimes feel familiar. If you’ve run brake lines or fuel lines or coolant hoses, then you probably have a decent understanding of various fittings and how to use thread tape and how to use hose clamps on a rubber coupling.

Honestly, this plumbing coupling:

Doesn’t look much different than my Chevy K1500’s upper radiator hose connection:

And there are certain machines in a home that might seem similar to certain parts of a car — a dishwasher might seem similar to, say, a wiper motor. But by and large, fixing cars and fixing house are extremely different largely thanks to the differences in material makeup, and with that difference comes differences in tools.

Tools

I’d say my automotive toolset is sufficient for probably 1/2 to 2/3 of the house projects I’ve worked on, and sometimes I’ve made do even when my tool isn’t optimal for the job.

For example, ideally I’d use a mitre saw to cut wood boards or a circular saw:

But all I had was a metal chopsaw, so I used it:

Also, ideally I’d use a pipe wrench to fix my plumbing issues, and I normally have a pipe wrench for tie rod adjustment, but since I’ve lost that wrench, a pair of vise grips did the job. But quite often, I had to go out and buy new tools.

I cannot use my sledgehammer as a jackhammer — well, not easily. So I bought a cheap jackhammer online:

In a house, you often have to seal a lot of things off, because sometimes the gaps are huge. Cars, generally, are built with precision, so any use of RTV silicone is relegated to sealing up systems like differentials and oil pans and cooling systems; any sealant in the vehicle’s body is not serviceable.

Look at all the caulking I had to do for just the shower pan:

Now look at how relatively little RTV went on this diff:

Naturally, given how much of this silicone you need for pretty much all house projects, I went out and bought a caulking gun:

In the car world, a jar or a small tube of silicone does most jobs:

Of course, we have grease guns (see below) that operate exactly the same way, but homes typically aren’t as pro-grease as the underside of cars are.

And then there’s paint. Painting homes is way, way easier than painting a car. You just buy a can of paint, a roller, and some masking tape, and you take care of business:

With a car, you’re going to want to spray the paint onto the smooth metal surface. And while a rattle can is better than a roller for anything that isn’t a tractor, even a rattle can won’t get you a great paint job on a car — you really need to use a paint booth and a spray gun. It’s honestly an art, whereas painting a house is a job anyone and their brother can do.

But aside from paint and automotive rust, I’d say overall working on a house is actually more difficult than working on a car, and that’s because many home repairs are aesthetic in nature.

Design/Aesthetic

While my wife was giving birth to our child Delmar (not his real name), we were moving to a new place that had a leaky bathroom. This meant we had to have the floor torn up, the wood boards underneath replaced, a new “hotmop” installed — it was a big job, and one that I myself was not comfortable undertaking.

My primary concern was that, unlike replacing a car’s control arm or driveshaft or wheel bearing, this job would have huge aesthetic implications, and my wife and I would notice them every single day.

So we hired contractors to handle everything, and to retile the bathroom. At this time, my wife was very pregnant, so when the contractors asked us what type of tile we wanted to put back in, my wife said: “I do not want to think about a bathroom remodel right now, you take care of it!”

Me?

While trying to work and take care of my wife, I had to figure out how to redesign an entire bathroom, and let me just say: It was like nothing I’d ever done with a car. And more than that, the people involved in home renovations are a totally different crowd than those on car forums. So when I went on social media/message boards to ask how to remodel my bathroom, I was interacting with what felt like a different group of folks than I was used to (for one, it seems more women are involved with home renos than swapping out vehicle suspensions, for whatever reason).

Anyway, take a look at what the old bathroom looked like:

After a bunch of runs to the Floor & Decor store with my 1989 Chevy K1500, I brought in the tiles I chose, gave it to the contractors, and prayed that my bathroom design — which, aside from a bit of input on forums and from my wife’s friend, I largely “winged” — wouldn’t upset my wife. Here’s the final result:

That’s the challenge of house repair — you have to make sure it looks nice, and given my current skillset, I could not have laid those tiles so nicely. The contractors did a nice job, though for over $20 big ones, they better have!

That’s the other thing worth talking about: Price.

Cost

I have to say: Overall, I was surprised by how cheaply you can fix house if you have the skills. That latter clause applies to cars, too, as mechanics shops are charging more and more lately due in part to technician shortages.

Really, with both cars and homes, farming out the work is going to be extremely expensive, with houses taking the cake. I mean, 20 big ones for a bathroom remodel? That’s absurd. There are few car repairs that would cost that much, because cars just aren’t that expensive to begin with; at a certain point, you just buy a new car.

But with a house, you can convince yourself that the remodeling costs will end up being worth it when you go to resell, because houses — especially in the LA area — are just so expensive.

Again, if you just go out and buy some tiles and retile yourself, you can remodel a bathroom for just a few grand. Ditto with most home repairs, including floors and roofs. But it’s all about having the skills, and in some cases, the permits.

Problem Solving & Basic Engineering Theory

As I alluded to at the start of the article, certain elements of automotive repair translate to home repair pretty much perfectly, with the big one being problem solving skills.

Take this issue I was having with my toilet. The lid was sliding all over the place! Since I hadn’t ever fixed a toilet lid, I went online and found this video:

The video shows that you just press the gray button in the center, and the lid lifts off. The issue I was having is that the allen screw holding the bracket to the toilet was just spinning.

Having dealt with the worst possible “nut on back side is spinning” issue on a Chevy HHR, I knew what to do; I had to get some vise grips on that nut. So that’s what I did; I reached behind my toilet, got vise grips on the rubber nut, and then tightened the screw. Boom, my toilet was fixed.

So some of these obvious bits of wrenching intuition definitely transfer over, and so does basic engineering know-how.

The deck above is something I designed myself after the previous deck completely rusted out. The issue with the previous deck is that the deck-boards were screwed into the 2″ steel tubes, allowing water to get trapped in the tubes (which lacked drain holes). So with the new design, I had the welder chuck in some angle iron, to be used for both fastening the composite boards boards (so no water would get in the square tubes) and to provide some support for the boards.

I ran a static analysis on the deck, finding that the previous steel tubes were too thick for this application — 11 gauge (0.120″) tubes were more than enough for a short three-foot deck extension. What’s more, the previous version of the deck’s legs had literally rusted where they went into the ground (they were just hovering; it’s not clear what was keeping my deck up), so the redesign employs a raised concrete footing with a bolted attachment instead of embedded (the bolted attachment makes it so that you can replace a leg without breaking out a jackhammer) as you can see above and in a previous image.

I’ve had lots of experience with metal corrosion, and one of the main culprits is stagnating water, while the second is stagnating dirt/grime that can trap water. I noticed on the deck that the gap between the steel tube butting up against the home’s bricks was trapping all sorts of junk, so I broke out the roofing “wetpatch” — this black tar-like substance — to fill in the gap the entire length of the deck.

So yeah, engineering know-how like static analyses, and basic experience of how rust proliferates translates over. Honestly, plenty of automotive wrenching translates over, at least enough to make learning the ropes associated with all the new materials and tools relatively enjoyable.

My next project is going to be a fun one. You see the steel gate above that I pulled out of a dumpster? I’ve purchased some wheels and an electric gate-opener, and I’m going to buy a v-track, with aims to build a nice automatic sliding gate at the end of our driveway.

This is going to involve me pouring concrete and drilling holes with special masonry bits — it’ll be tough, and will definitely feel new. And I like that; I like learning new skills, even if they’re only kinda new.