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It doesn’t matter whether you are just moving into your first apartment or whether you are on your second home and second kid — being handy is helpful. Handiness can save you thousands of dollars over your lifetime as you maintain and repair belongings yourself that you would otherwise pay to have fixed or replaced. Plus, handiness can be fun.
However, few young men have the time or resources to become handy nowadays; most are focused on academics, career-building and maintaining social connections, and few have a handy mentor around to teach them how to wire an outlet or patch drywall. It is never too late to become handy, but it can be difficult not only to motivate yourself to gain the skill but also to teach yourself handiness when you are starting from zero.
Fortunately, there are all sorts of solutions for modern men who want to upgrade their handiness skill. Here are a few ideas to help you become handy today.
Enroll in a Handiness Course
Few people would try to teach themselves skills like data analysis or marketing; most people pursue formal education to learn as much as they can from qualified instructors. Fortunately, you can do the same with handiness if you know where to look.
Hardware and home improvement stores often offer brief courses on various handiness skills, like using power tools, addressing small plumbing problems and performing minor electrical work. Some of these courses are free and others require a small per-class fee. Sometimes, the class is centered around a specific project; for example, at some Home Depot locations, you can enroll in workshops that teach you how to build home décor from wood and other materials. You can look online for a schedule of upcoming classes and enroll in them if any catch your eye.
For an even more formal education in handiness, you might look into courses offered through your city’s parks and recreation department or even a local community college. These programs do come with small tuition costs, but they often go deeper into certain skills than short workshops do. Each course will focus on a different field, like electrical work or drywall installation and repair. Again, you can do online research to determine what programs are available near you, or you can contact your local parks and rec or community college over the phone.
Subscribe to DIY Websites
Though a thorough education tends to be hard-earned, you can gain some knowledge through osmosis. Simply by frequently exposing yourself to handiness, you can begin learning bits and pieces of various skills. It is useful to subscribe to a reputable DIY website, like House Method, to soak up as much handiness knowledge as you can. For some projects, you don’t need much more than clear written instructions, and even for large scale jobs, the more you read about them, the better prepared you will be when you begin.
Pick up Skills From Different Folks
It is difficult to learn handiness from a book or video alone; you really need to have hands-on experience with various skills to understand and remember them. Yet, it is a bad idea to stumble into nearly any handiness project without informed guidance.
Even if you don’t have someone consistently available to help you learn handiness, you should be able to find a few short-term mentors. You can interview friends, family and neighbors about projects they have completed and ask them for assistance with similar efforts in your home. It’s common for people to pick up one or two abilities through the course of life, and having someone with some degree of expertise on hand will help you learn the steps of a certain project faster. If you really can’t rustle up any handy loved ones, you should take full advantage of knowledgeable staff at hardware and home improvement stores.
Volunteer With Different Charities
It’s not always a good idea to start experimenting with handiness on your own property. If you make a mistake, even a small one, you could cause severe damage that impacts your home value for years to come. Instead of putting your home at risk, you can gain more handiness skill and apply it by volunteering with certain charities that make use of volunteers for construction or home repair. Some examples of charities that perform this type of work (and that often seek volunteers) include Habitat for Humanity, Home for Our Troops and the Fuller Center for Housing. Many volunteers lack handy experience, so you won’t feel out of place, and there will be experts on-site to show you exactly what to do.
You don’t have to be handy to be a good man, but having a high-level handiness skill can be useful in saving money, helping others and finding satisfaction in life. Becoming handy takes time and effort, and you will make plenty of mistakes along the way. Fortunately, with perseverance, you could become the handiest person you know.
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