5 Home Improvement Projects Best Left to the Pros

Are you the type of homeowner who takes pride in their ability to fix basically anything that can go wrong within your four walls? Someone who never shies away from a DIY challenge, no matter how confusing or misleading the available YouTube literature is on the matter?

Your family salutes you, as does your wallet. Still, you can’t afford to get too complacent. Some “DIY” home improvement projects are best left to the pros.

Which ones, you ask? These five, for starters: some big, some small, all best done by someone with years of experience and — ideally — pertinent professional credentials to show for it.

Home Improvement Projects

1. Structural Remediation

Please don’t rent a foundation jack and try to lift your house yourself. That will only end in tears, or worse.

Instead, hire a qualified structural remediation company that can first assess the problem and then, if warranted, help fix it. Larger firms like Karim Allana’s ABB are best for multifamily settings (such as condos), while smaller outfits can assist with single-family properties.

2. Installing a New Breaker Box

Upgrading your home electric service is a potentially costly project if you hire a professional. And if you’re comfortable wiring smaller stuff at home, you might wonder how much more difficult it could possibly be to swap out your breaker box.

Unfortunately, you don’t want to find out. Not only is this a big project that can take two professional electricians the better part of two days, but it’s also incredibly confusing for people without years of wiring experience.

By the time you realize you’ve overloaded or mismatched half the circuits in your house, it’ll be too late to do anything but undo everything and start over again.

3. Hardwiring an EV Charger

Hardwiring a home EV charger is a smaller job than upgrading an entire electric panel, but the degree of difficulty is still quite high. 

A poorly installed home charger is a major fire risk. More subtle misconfiguration could cause your car to charge at the wrong time of day, sending your electric bill skyrocketing. 

Fortunately, utilities like Ohio’s AEP Electric help customers install and manage home charging equipment, with no DIY required.

4. Hooking Up a New Washer or Dryer

Most modern washers and dryers plug directly into wall outlets, so you don’t have to worry about hardwiring hazards. Then again, if you’re replacing a gas dryer with an electric dryer and need to upgrade the outlet, that’s best left to a professional electrician.

The real risk comes with hooking up new gas dryers, particularly if you don’t have gas service in the utility room or if you need to add exterior ventilation. Improper ventilation is a serious indoor health hazard for homeowners with gas appliances, so don’t leave this to chance.

5. Adding Blow-in Insulation

The good news: Home insulation no longer contains asbestos, a leading cause of lung cancer and other health problems.

The bad news: Insulation of any type is still not healthy to breathe in, and spray foam insulation is very difficult to work with. It cures quickly, which raises the stakes of shoddy work.

When DIY Is Dangerous

Homeowners who pride themselves on their DIY skills must also know their limits. You don’t want to learn the hard way that DIY can be dangerous.

It’s not that these five home improvement projects are inherently dangerous, but let’s be honest: heavy electrical work offers little room for error while scrambling around on rooftops with an insulation blower is vertigo-inducing at best and outright hazardous at worst.

Sure, we all like to save some money, but your life is worth a great deal more than whatever your local electrician, roofer, or insulation specialist charges for labor.

Bottom line: DIYers like you should know which battles to pick and which to pass on. After all, that’s how you live to DIY another day.

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I also use Artificial Intelligence Image generators to create some of my images. These are to show you examples of my ideas and inspiration when I cannot produce the real images myself.