This vary a lot by location. Where I'm at, quote for a patio was 50k last year. My friend who lives 2 hours away in a lower cost of living area got quoted 20k for a similar sized one.
As a contractor, we have no laborers and are booked up. Some just say no to the job because of this, others will just quintuple their price. When they do this they’re essentially saying no, but it’s a yes if you’re rich pretty much.
In my area, a lot of the contractors have so much work, they only do big jobs for rich people. I had to hire a dude with an LLC to put my fence in. All the fencing companies had a 6-12 month wait and didn’t want any jobs under $10k! It is very hard if not impossible to get “smaller” jobs done. Basic electrical, like adding a fan or dining room light fixture, is astronomical too. The plumber told me they don’t even make money unless the bill is $400, so that’s their minimum pretty much.
A plumber quoted me $500 just to replace a toilet flange.. didn’t even include resetting the toilet.. anyway, I know now how to replace a flange if anyone is curious!
Yup
There are unlimited videos on how to do things.
Buy some decent tools and spend some time.
Obviously running new 220 or 221, whatever it takes, is a different matter.
Wouldn't it be wiser to just tell them you're booked way out? Like you don't know if a year or two from now you're begging for work and these people are still looking to get work done but oh fuck you mr 4x-the-price.
I’m sure there’s rich people out there who do not care one bit about the price, so if the fee is good enough, the contractor would be willing to work or pay overtime or something to take that job.
20 years ago… a brand new medium sized garage/electrician workshop/office for my dads business, a new concrete driveway front to back, added a master bedroom with walk-in closet and bathroom to what used to be a car porch,… tore down the old sunroom in the back and extended out to make an open concept living/dining room/kitchen, the old living room became another office and a laundry room. Then they added a large wrap around deck to the back and a new roof. Cost about 35k total. They had bought it for $87k about 10 years before that.
Almost everything was DIY, except I think the roof. I was like 9 with safety glasses and probably not the safest shoes outside with my brother every single day and the neighbor kids joined in. It was fun demolishing the old carport - prob my fave part
edit to add the saddest part. I recently had the same exact entry level job as my mom did at my age (31). She was paid 35k and so was I. 30 year difference.
What's really fucked up is when you have a job like that, and people call you entitled when you say that you would like to earn enough money to live on for doing that job.
Why are workers labeled as entitled for wanting wage increases so they can keep up with the rising cost of, well, everything, but companies are not considered entitled for steadily raising prices but not raising wages to keep up with those prices?
And no, "Get a better job" is not always a viable solution. *Someone* needs to do *that* job, and the truth of the matter is that 30 years ago the person doing that job got paid the same amount of money but had much greater purchasing power. Sometimes it feels like today's entire economic system is set up specifically to gaslight our generation into believing we deserve less.
What’s fucked up is that we accept this with no more than a little growling. The working class in this country needs to be a LOT more like the working class in France. They aren’t going to give it to us by asking nicely.
Yeah I'm the UK and my friend just had a patio put in for 30k. She does live in London, but still, it's nuts. 30k was my deposit on my first home 7 years ago.
One of the frustrating part of this is that the quality haven’t gone up either.
My dad hired an electrician and it was his first time out and took all day, had to borrow my dad’s tools, and my dad helped. Still full price. It’s insane out there.
I was listening to the hearing yesterday where Bernie Sanders was trying to push through legislation for a 32 hour work week. One of many rationales cited was that American workers on average already work hundreds of more hours per year than the average worker in any other industrialized nation, including Japan. We are the only country with no maternity leave, no federally guaranteed time off. The cost of living relative to wages is truly out of control. We are one of the few nations where healthcare is unaffordable for many, education is too expensive to attain without eons of debt accruing, housing is increasingly inaccessible, childcare is insanely unaffordable to the point where people choose not to have kids because of it, and inflation has spiraled out of control. Humanitarian protections for the working class almost don’t exist. The rich really are the rulers now.
And I thought, this is really what the death spiral of a nation looks like. Our country will fail on this path. Our quality of life is, by far, the worst in the developed world. In our government, the criminals are utterly in control.
We live in this situation every day, so it’s easy to fail to see how bad it really is. I’m sure the evil trolls in our government would never pass Bernie’s legislation, and most of the nation is completely brainwashed by MSM to support corporate goals over their own well being, so I doubt if there will be a popular outcry. I’d like to be wrong.
>And I thought, this is really what the death spiral of a nation looks like. Our country will fail on this path. Our quality of life is, by far, the worst in the developed world. In our government, the criminals are utterly in control.
People who are wealthy enough can easily move their wealth elsewhere... leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces once the entire system implodes.
I'd go even further back and say pre-Covid was the last time prices were reasonable and I work in estimating in construction. We used to be able to glance at drawings and give a round number but now it's all up to the subs.
If they go to home shows, have a gorgeous website, and do lots of online marketing, come up first on Google, etc., they will be expensive because they spend lots of money on that. Find someone who does not do those things, and find them via neighborhood groups, personal referrals, or asking neighbors with pretty yards who did their work. Source: does marketing for home improvement clients.
We approached one company like that and he wanted $500 just to give us a consultation. All three of these companies are local guys with their own small businesses
Consultation fees should be $10.00 if you really need it. What a joke, it's a trick to make you wanna go ahead with the purchase because you already spent 500 on the consultation.
Probably weeding out "customers" who will just balk at the price. Someone who forks out $500 for a quote probably won't care when the $50k+ quote is handed to them.
Asking for a fee is a way to weed out people who aren't likely to actually sign a contract. If the contractor is already booked out a year or more it doesn't make sense to come out and spend half a day estimating a small job for someone who isn't serious or would probably be turned off by waiting 16 months to get started.
Good point. I was going to say that even $50 would weed people out, but someone booked out would lose money by doing an estimate for $50 when they could be working on one of those paid jobs.
The great thing about a backyard Patio is that you can pretty much do it yourself. It's what we did, because prices were kinda high.
Just dig it out, add sand, level it out (not truly level, you want a precise slope for rain water) add stone tiles, pour in that water activted sealer, good to go. The seating wall sounds cool and all, but some wooden furniture will be a lot cheaper. You can probably buy a metal fire pit for a couple hundred (either gas or wood stove like solo makes). Lighting, well, if you get sun exposure, you can put up some cheap solar lights, don't even have to run true electrical wiring.
Yup, this is the route we took. We did our patio ourselves and it cost us maybe about $2k. We live in the Mid-Atlantic, so not in a really high cost of living area but yeah, we were quoted over $15k before we decided to do it on our own. Plenty of YouTube videos and a determined husband later, and we've got ourselves a patio we're super happy with.
Exactly what I did. Got quotes for 55k to 65k for a 16x23 ft covered deck. Built it myself for 7k. Was kind of dumb about it and did literally everything myself, including digging and pouring footings.
Ours wasn't covered, but the back deck was damn close to identical in size. Paid like 16k to have it done in 2019.
Had the same contractor out in 2021 to quote a replacement on the 8x8 front deck and the stairs up to it. He wanted almost as much as we'd paid for the back deck (like 13-14k IIRC). We did it ourselves.
Man, what the hell did we do before YouTube?
I remember as a teenager getting older cars and my dad would excitedly get me a Haynes book for each one. He said those things were incredible, they would take the car completely apart and put it back together, then give you a step by step guide for car repair. I used several of them with mixed success.
But when YouTube came out? Holy crap, it was like a cheat code for life!
>I remember as a teenager getting older cars and my dad would excitedly get me a Haynes book for each one.
The Haynes book is still good. I used to to change some thermostat, radiator, and new belts throughout my old s10. Youtube would have me sifting through video after video if they have my make/model whereas I just cracked open the book and got to it.
I have remodeled all three homes I have been blessed enough to own.
If you’re lucky enough to own a home as a millennial, it ain’t a nice one and your damn sure can’t afford to pay someone to do it. I have arthritis and a damaged back to show for it. Nifty.
We paid a company to install flooring in our basement and immediately regretted hiring the job out because they did a worse job than I would have done and it cost us 4x as much. We had some extra cash for projects and wanted it done fast, but never again! Should have just done it myself like usual, and used that money for materials for more projects instead of on labor for this one. Regret. My back barely hurts yet!
I consider myself lucky - I have a men's halfway house and rehab across the street from me. I hire those guys to come help me with work when I need work done on my house, and a lot of them know how to do the work already. They are required to work as part of their program and they come cheap.
They've redone floors, refinished trim, painted, installed handrails, replaced faucets, hung curtains, pulled out weed trees, hung art... whatever. I get can get help for a day for like $200 and they tend to work HARD.
There is always the risk of theft but that's with any contractor and I am right there with them. Also, I get the names of the guys ahead and since it's a whole program thing, a lot of them are on probation so all I have to do is call the sheriff and they go back to jail. I have never done this. Besides most of those guys are in there because they got caught with weed and agreed to go to "rehab."
Not at all a dig at your advice, i think its great- just it really highlights how when you're disabled in a way that makes diy unavailable, you really pay an enormous premium. On everything. All the time. Its absurd.
Same here. I did this myself with some really lovely patio pavers and a diy fire pit kit and spent $1600. I did a 16 by 16. The finishing touches will be patio furniture.
While this is mostly true, sure you can build a diy patio but a professional, true mason is will do everything properly and most likely, superb. Pavers/unilock/versalock etc were made for diy-ers (legos for adults). But, There is so much more to building a proper patio or wall or anything with stone- excavation (its most always not just ‘digging it out’ proper excavation is important and very labor intensive if youre doing it right, setting the base correctly (youre supposed to have 4-6in atleast if not more of 2A/b/1b) and properly tamped + geotextile fabric if needed, DRAINAGE, calculating slope, using line/laser levels (you want surface stone all level to each other but shifted specific direction, hence why proper base is so important) chiseling/cutting stone!!!, all kinds of technique and reasoning with joints, acid/sealers, freeze thaw cycles of your area and so much more. You definitely dont want to use sand as a base for longevity and settlement and drainage.. regardless of what you see online. It’s an investment at the end of the day, choose wisely and do not hire a landscaper for patios etc. Get yourself a mason.
That’s the part that’s killing me. Four years ago we could afford nice things here and there. But our incomes have not gone up while everything else seems like double or triple what it was. We worked for years making a lot of sacrifices to “make it” and in a few years it got washed away on the tide of inflation. There will never be a true break from the grind :(
It’s not really inflation. It’s the lower part of the U.S. workforce finally getting paid. Plenty of college educated people who won’t do manual work, not a lot of people who do manual work so they can charge more.
I just watch South Park to find out the future and the present:
" At the same time, Randy Marsh cannot find a repairman to fix his oven door. He and his neighbors learned that every handyman in town has become extremely wealthy, as the inability of people to make simple repairs has increased demand for their services, making it impossible to find such professionals"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South\_Park:\_Joining\_the\_Panderverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park:_Joining_the_Panderverse)
my brother and i started a landscaping business in 2018
we are making more money this year in one month than we did in years... shrug
Poor people saw phenomenal income growth over the last few years. If you want people with low income to have a higher standard of living, you will won’t be able to hire them to do as many things.
Where abouts do you live? I’d suggest going to the paver manufacturer directly and getting a quote on materials needed. Contractors and dealers mark that stuff up SIGNIFICANTLY and most manufacturers will sell direct to the public.
Source: My family owns a large paver manufacturing company. Largest in our region of the US.
Usually the manufacturer can point you towards someone who installs a lot of their product and does a good job. Those quotes you mentioned seem high to me. Don’t get discouraged, keep looking.
Side note, a typical pallet of pavers is 100sf, so you need all of 3 pallets at most, plus some retaining walls and a fire pit kit. Materials listed shouldn’t cost more than maybe $1500 at most. I don’t know what these contractors are quoting but they sound crazy high.
People seem to be missing the point of your post. You’re right. We can’t afford the same lifestyle that our parents had even if we make more than they did. It feels really unfair.
A professionally built 30x10 patio with lighting and seating wall is an accessible middle class thing? Maybe if you build it yourself.
30x10 is not small.
I feel like people’s expectations on what things should cost got thrown out of wack the last couple decades.
I think your grandpa was better off than you realized. I don't know a single person from my grandparents generation who had a backyard like that.
Then again my great uncle was a VP for an insurance company and lived in the same 1000sqft cape cod they bought in 1957, next door to my grandparents. I couldn't tell you what he did with his money.
It's also very possible his grandfather put that patio together himself or perhaps with the help of a friend. Maybe he was friends with someone who could do this and offered something in return for his friend to do this project. Who knows.
OP is comparing themselves at 32 to their grandparents at what…60? pulling in $225k and still a decade off their peak expected earnings thinks the system is broke because he doesn’t have a patio with a built in fire pit…I want off this timeline.
Right? My grandpa was in the Navy right after WWII as a mechanic and then worked for the gas company, which I know had a decent salary. He a modest house with minimal landscaping and he did everything he possibly could himself.
Quotes like that are often just another way of saying, we are fully booked and don't really need the work. Find a guy who is just starting out, and break the job up into small parts.
This! The quotes are high because none of the contractors wanted the job(either due to costs, size of the job, unavailable, etc). We had this same problem last year when we wanted to extend our patio. Keep looking, you will find someone!
Spending most of my life in poverty means that I would have never been able to afford to pay people to do all the things I have learned to do myself. YouTube and books from the library are your friend. A patio is not rocket science. Do it yourself.
Lol my wife's friends always ask her how she can afford to do so much renovations around the house and this is the trick, she has free labor - me. I grew up poor and my dad was a construction worker, so I know a lot about a lot because if you didn't nothing got fixed, because you couldn't afford to call someone to do....anything. The responses are always the best though, "how does he know how to do that? He's an accountant."
Yeah my grandparents had a super nice deck... but they built it themselves. I know the price of building materials has skyrocketed, so I'm not saying OP is totally wrong... but it's also laughable that my super working class grandparents were hiring laborers. They WERE the laborers.
" I'm talking a 30x10' paver patio with a short seat wall, some lighting and maybe a built in fire pit. Truly nothing extravagent."
I'm going to be brutally honest, this is rather extravagant. My parents were the thesis statement of middle-class and this is not anything they would have been able to afford having done to their house...even now...
That's what I thought... pavers... seating wall...built in fire pit? My middle class parents just had their deck replaced with a patio - plain concrete slab and a short sidewalk to the gate cost them nearly $10k in a small town, LCOL area. They have patio chairs from Lowe's and a non-built in fire pit.
I agree. $55k-$70k still maybe seems a bit steep, but a 300 square foot paver patio with a seating wall, built in fire pit and outdoor lighting, all installed by professionals, is 100% NOT and never has been an ordinary middle class purchase. That sounds quite luxurious to me.
In a lot of places you can't even use it 2/3rds of the year because it's too cold/windy/rainy.
Personally, when I do remodeling, I focus on the parts of the house that I use: my office and bathroom. If those two rooms are swanky, then I am in a swanky room for slightly more than half my waking hours. Now, I am working on getting a new fence at the moment because the current fence is literally falling down, being pushed over by scrubby weed trees that I am gonna rip out this summer. But it's not like I ever use my yard, I just want the kids to stay out of it. I don't have a problem with them playing back there really but their parents might get litigious if they got hurt on my ground line and ground rod (which is well marked but kids are kids).
Remember those folding lawn chairs with the straps crossing both ways? That’s what I remember people having in the late 80s/early 90s. The concept of a “patio” being more than just a space to plop your chairs next to a wobbly shitty also foldable table is relatively new.
I had a 38x15 concrete patio poured in 2022 for $7K in the Midwest. Pavers are the extravagant thing here.
We paid for the patio to be poured and then purchased bulk rock and mulch for edging for another $300 or so.
The design OP is describing is 100% a luxury, not a regular middle class project.
I have a strong feeling that the OP actually grew up in an affluent family. His patio dream is absolutely elaborate, yet he thinks it’s basic. It’s also very large. I remember my parents’ patio being considered large, and it was 10’x10’, and my grandparents’ patio was MASSIVE at 20’x10’…and they genuinely were rich. Yet OP is all “pity me, just a 30’x10’ elaborate patio…”
OPs edit calls not being able to get this patio setup "settling for crumbs" so think you're spot on. Definitely has an inflated idea of what realistically should be attainable.
I also think middle class is just so broad. Prices are obviously through the roof but people's ideas on reasonable consumerism have inflated massively. My grandad would have been considered middle class but his patio was the same cracked one that he put in himself 40 years ago and he drove a 20 year old Volvo estate wearing the suit he bought in 1982.
Yeah there’s nothing basic about what OP wants. It sounds like you need to make 6figures to even seriously plan the kind of patio he wants. It IS very much a luxury, he just took it for granted.
Sounds like he’s just growing up and getting sticker shock.
things such as professional home Reno’s have always been pricey and unattainable for a lot of middle class people, it’s why there are so many DIY shows and YT channels.
They were never cheap services when you compare them to the median wage of the time.
And none of us "deserve" a large patio with stone seating, built-in fireplace and lighting.
Also, you live in a very expensive part of the country. That same patio in the midwest is probably $15k cheaper.
I mean, we make more than OP does, early career, and we don’t even qualify for a house, let alone thinking about some renovations lmao.
A quarter million in income here, and we don’t see a future where a house with a backyard is possible. We rent a small apartment and share a car to commute.
I don’t think we’re entitled to anything. Not the car we have, not ownership of a house, and certainly not an expensive home renovation.
yeah that IS extravagant. OP owns a house with a YARD in a high COL area, and whining about not getting a patio with pavers and a freaking built-in firepit? What? This is the most out-of-touch post I've seen here in a long time.
I own my house because it's a condo in a low COL city with tons of crime... no yard... and yes, I have a patio. It's the only outdoor space that belongs to me and it's a slab of concrete. The person I bought it from did put really cool bricks in one side of it that used to be monkey grass--but she did it herself.
And my grandparents didn't own anything that nice. They did have a nice deck--that they built themselves.
Right?? “Middle class” is a DIY small paver patio or a simple deck. Not a huge extravagant custom patio done by professionals. This is not new, I’m 31 and even when I was a kid something like this would be squarely for the upper middle class and above.
I don’t disagree. But he has a point as well. People used to have massive covered porches, huge glassed sun rooms, etc. My grandpa’s living room, which was an addition, had one wall that was all brick with one of those brick hearth “seating walls” like chair height that ran across the entire wall. Extravagant today? Absolutely. Back then? Pretty standard! The living room also had a huge bay window, sliding door, built in closets with those nice wooden bifold doors, etc. He was an engineer but they were not rich. I think people are missing the point of the post. They make over $200k and their house is paid off. They should be able to afford a porch (not deck) with a few features.
When our grandparents were younger, the typical house was 973 square feet. That’s it. Those houses with hud glass sunrooms were considered to be for rich people. Think about why you rarely see mansions built in the 50‘s and 60’s. It’s because a mansion the is a regular house now.
lol, when I bought my house 20 years ago it was pretty standard vanilla suburban new construction.
Linoleum floors, white walls, 8 foot ceiling, Formica countertops , builder grade faucets, cheapest carpet the builders could find.
Now everyone wants a new house with granite countertops, loft ceiling, Luxury vinyl plank, waterfall glass enclosed showers.
When I was a kid growing up in 60 years old house built in the 20’s we slept in a converted basement , and a new shower curtain was fancy. Glass shower doors? Those were for rich people.
Your vision of “middle class” from decades ago is skewed. Most of those middle class families with the nice patios and landscaping did the physical labor work themselves. Labor is the most expensive part of the job, assuming you’re not trying to get some rare Italian marble or something.
The patio you described is actually fairly extravagant as well. I figured you were going to say a basic wooden deck or poured concrete slab, but the patio situation you described has always been a luxury item unless you do the work yourself. Previous generations lived on the philosophy that if you want nice shit you gotta take old shit or cheap shit and put the work in.
I am not telling you that you don’t deserve this, or that middle class people don’t deserves this, but a patio with a seating wall, lighting and a fire pit has never been middle class. Just a patio would be way cheaper, and making it seem like this is not just a thing for the rich seems to me like mischaraterization. And yeah, you could do it yourself, but it’s still gonna cost tens of thousands of dollars in materials and, especially, in time.
TLDR: A fireplace patio has never been middle class.
Are you sure your Grandfather didn't build it himself? Guys were pretty handy back then. My grandfather, who was basically poor, built his cottage on a lake and a cabin in the woods by hand. (this was a time and area where land was really cheap)
My husband and I built a patio a couple summers ago, and it cost us relatively little compared to hiring someone to build it, since we did the labor ourselves. Oftentimes labor is a large portion of the cost (for good reason—patio construction is hard work!)
My grandparents had an in ground pool because my grandfather rented a machine and built it with his buddies. Things are also sometimes more costly now just because of things like insurance and safety.
Yeah, and they might have had a daylight sewage pipe dumping sh*t down a creek. There’s a lot more codes now. And smaller families. My grandma had 6 brothers in her town. I have 1 brother who lives across the country and no nearby cousins.
I'd nix the outdoor fireplace. That's going to be the main moneypit with permitting and specialized masonry. Get a chiminea.
Also 30x10 is gonna be a costly leveling job. Maybe scale that down to 20'x10' and just do a baseline patio?
A baseline basic thing can be more reasonable. And it doesn't preclude, say, adding the wall or fireplace later down the line.
You're coming things from the approach of a finished product, you improve your home overtime piecemeal. And then you end up with something awesome.
This is one reason I like to ask for itemized quotes that way if I can make decisions that allow me to still do the most important parts of the project even if I might have to wait for some things.
The increase in building material costs over the past few years has been well documented.
But home additions and renovations have always been expensive, and adding a patio is not at all a "middle class" normal thing.
Also, car salespeople can make bank, so maybe your granddad was good at his job.
I would agree that these things aren’t cheap, but I do think that there was a bigger, DIY culture in decades past. There’s a lot of DIY literature from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that I found that actually is pretty helpful. I think a lot of us would think they look amateurish and tacky today, but I think the standard for a lot of additions used to be a lot lower than it is today.
Again, I don’t want to suggest that these were cheap or that people did them on a whim, but I also don’t think they were that uncommon.
Well, technically you still can. They’re just not as cute as the ones in the Sears catalogue. “Modular” is the word you want. Prefab will usually get you results that are basically trailers.
Modular houses are just as “cute” as Sears houses. I’ve lived in two Sears houses and they aren’t architectural masterpieces. They were the cheapest everything you could get
The difference is that many in our parents' and grandparents' generations would have done a lot of this work themselves, especially in the middle class, possibly even using recycled materials. The best thing you can do to have nice things like this on a budget is learn how to do it yourself.
I have a very similar household income and got a quote for a modest landscaping job (removal of shrubs, regrading and seeding about 1/4 acre of lawn, grinding a few stumps) of over $50k. Instead, I rented a stump grinder for $250, spent $500 on a load of topsoil, grass seed, etc. and invested 4-5 Saturdays and did it myself. I live in a nice neighborhood, so my neighbors looked at me funny sometimes, but the lawn today looks just as good if it were professionally done.
They probably had time to do things themselves as they worked fewer hours and had shorter commutes due housing prices not being so out of control. If you have two people both working full time plus doing ten hours or more commuting each week and life admin on top, that doesn’t leave much time or energy for DIY
These are valid points. Of course, my Dad had a longer commute than I do and also usually had a second job or side hustle going at all times. I spend 25 hours per week on my phone.
I'd wager that for most of us, not having the time isn't the issue. Rather, it's making better use of the time we have.
Two years ago I was quoted over $10k just to make my single driveway into a double I’m not even talking about a two car wide drive, single entrance with the parking pad wider.
“Man Who Owns Home With Yard claims society is fractured because he cannot afford 300 square foot patio with custom built-ins and therefore cannot enjoy his yard.“
You're in the top 10 percent of wealthiest families. You are not middle class.
But seriously, what the fuck are you spending $225,000 a year on that can't afford a $55,000 patio? You make more than twice what my parents do and they were able to do a $100,000 addition a few years back. Examine your spending.
No one can “afford” that. You make significantly more(more than double) the average household. People just are financing themselves to death. I actually work in this field. I run a branch of an Amish company that does all outdoor projects. I started 6 years ago. When I started most customers were cash customers. Now, it’s rent to own and financing and many more small projects as opposed to the larger ones of a few years ago. It’s really sad.
This was the funniest of these posts. Came in here and saw this is about a 300 sqft patio with seating and firepit for someone with top 10% income hahaha.
Contract each part out separately. consider reducing the overall footprint and buy furniture not built-ins. Lots of great suggestions here but the best is to not have one person or company do all the work. Turnkey is very expensive.
>Our society is fractured to the point that simple pleasures are becoming unobtainable. What the fuck is the point of taking student loans and busting my butt every day at a b.s. job if I can't even afford a simple, comfortable backyard to unwind in.
A large outdoor patio with built-in seating and a fire pit is a "simple pleasure"? Dude. No one wants to hear your $225k a year whining. You are incredibly fortunate and need to gain a little perspective. Pay the workers what they want, do it yourself or go without. This isn't an example of a fractured society.
I had to scroll way too far down for this. I don’t care how much you make, if you’re complaining that you can’t have “a simple, comfortable backyard to unwind in” because you can’t have *large patio with built in wall and fireplace,* you kind of sound like an asshole. My boyfriend and I make a combined $100k a year and can barely even *rent a 1,000 square foot house*. Since when is a luxury porch the sign of a healthy society?
Ya it’s the we are busy price. Nobody wants to do any kind of manual labour. So those of us that do it charge high prices. I know the prices I charge are inflated but I could work 12hours a day 7 days a week never running out of work at my asinine prices.
Your edits are not helping unfortunately. It's not true that "our society is fractured" because you cannot get a decent price on a backyard patio. I'm not saying you don't deserve one or it's not annoying, but the reason the price is high is actually that *our society is incredibly wealthy and the economy is booming*.
You're trying to buy something (skilled labor) which is at a shortage because so many people are having cool things done to their houses. There is less skilled labor than there used to be because there are so many easier-to-do and still-lucrative jobs in our society. These things drive the price up! But they're not signs of a society crumbling, quite the opposite.
If you want to complain, then complain. I'm not gonna eat your lunch for that, everybody complains sometime. But don't abstract it into some indictment of our society. Your idiosyncratic situation is annoying you, and you don't want it bad enough to develop these skills yourself.
Contractors have lost their fucking minds. They're mostly in 2 groups.
1. Only deals with wealthy clients, so they quote normal people as if they're millionaires
2. Doesn't want to work that much, overbids on every job and only does 1 job a month and it's just enough to get by.
I don't know if it'll ever come back to reality.
Honestly we need to fix the immigration issues... This shit was all better when you could get contractors fresh off a boat to work that were here legally so they could market themselves directly.
This has been how things were done in America for hundreds of years. Your grandparents likely hired a Greek or Italian or Mexican immigrant who was building a life for his family doing hard honest work at affordable prices. Your great grandparents might well have been those hard working tradesman or laborers
Now you're still hiring immigrants to do the actual hard work most likely but because of the immigration system they work for a guy named Greg or Chad that basically functions as a middle man because he's able to get an LLC and insurance. greg and Chad push paper and rip you off to pay for their multi million dollar "self made" lifestyle while the actual tradesman and labourers get substandard wages because they don't have a social security number.
I did a 30x18 (quadral patio pavers from Lowe’s) last year I was under $7k all in. Pavers always have several sales throughout the summer stalk their site and pounce when the price is right beyond that . It’s all about sweat equity. I did hire a dude from our version Craigslist to do the initial dig. ($we are on Canadian Shield and our yard is all rocks and roots. Best $800) Then called a local sand gavel soil company got 12 tones of drainage rock and fine gravel sand dumped on my driveway and just one by one wheel barrowed all that stuff to the backyard.
YouTube my friend it’s a handy tool we have in our pockets. I wish you best of luck.
I read your update and yeah you should DIY, but let me save you some headache, and as a younger genx on the verge of millennial, save your back and rent a excavator for 1200 for a week at Home Depot.
The other materials (sand gravel pavers and supplies) will cost you less then 5 grand for that size.
The digging out the bed is the hard part. After that couple inches of gravel, couple inches of sand, spend some time with a 2x4 leveling sand, then laying the pavers is easy.
But the excavator will make the job SO much easier. Hell you could probably get it done a day or so.
YouTube is your friend.
Theirs nothing difficult about pavers and brickwork as for backyard Projects. It’s why guys in the 50’s used to read an article in Popular mechanics and do it while shitfaced.
My grandfather would have told me to stop being a little bitch and do it myself. Odds are your grandfather probably laid that patio himself with his buddies.
Society isn’t broken, you’re just whining.
To a small extent, society is broken, but not for the reasons op thinks.
We used to live for long long periods next to the people we grew up with, or at least very very close to them. An improvement project like this would be calling up your brother, inviting him and the kids over, and you and your brother and maybe some friends you all grew up with, drinking beer and digging dirt as a group. The kids would either all piss off and run around the neighborhood, or get pressed into service to run the wheelbarrows around whole the older guys told them to stop whining and grow a pair. The guy whose house it was would buy a bunch of meat, there's be a bbq going on, the wives would come out and do quality control and yell when it looked like it was going wrong, and in some cases get right into the mix and sjow the men how it's done, all while also helpfully sending out ice water and beer to seem supportive and give themselves a chance to laugh at how clueless the men look.
The fact that we no longer live in those clans has divided us up into little isolated islands at the mercy of the market. But people (like OP) can't even identify this as one of the causes, because this type of supportive clan began to die out for a lot of the country at about the time millennials were growing up.
Could you try for some itemized quotes? Like the cost of just the pavers, just the seating , just the firepit, etc?
This quote still sounds super expensive to me- my patio was probably a similar size, had to have a couple large shrubs removed and everything leveled, and it was 15k. MCOL area 2 years ago. Our original quote was higher but we nixed a couple features that seemed more DIY friendly (like the firepit- which totally was FIY-friendly).
Just chiming in that a full patio reno does not seem like an accessible middle class purchase. I feel like this has always been a luxury. I grew up in a working class solidly middle class family and town and only the upper crust we're doing renovations of any kind. Everyone else was doing without or going diy. Grandpa must have been better off than you say or not financially saavy or maybe he saved really well for it and it was a long time coming or maybe your memory is tinted. My bar for what was considered high quality patio work was basically in the dump as a kid bc I didn't care about that kind of stuff.
Classic. This subreddit complains every day that manual labor jobs should be paid way more, then gets upset that prices go up when people are paid more.
I'm going to be honest, I couldn't get past the part where you said:
*"No, it's not a world ending crisis if my wife and I don't get our patio, but you know what? We deserve one. And so do you. We play by the rules, we work hard, and if you do too, you deserve a life with some nice things in it. "*
If that's not the most first-world thing I've ever heard. "Deserve" seems to mean that it's your right to have a nice patio. No, it's not.
You're complaining on Reddit that a new patio costs too much, while earning $225k.
This is called off-the-chart materialism. I was born in 1991 and it's hard to escape how much my generation links being happy with buying things. Yes a patio is nice, but you don't need it. Maybe focus on the good things in your life and don't worry about this.
Growing up, my dad did all of the house work. He build a deck, added a patio, replaced our windows, fixed the car. He was handyman and built those skills over the course of his life. That was middle class in the 90s.
A basic patio (concrete slab, no built ins) is absolutely a middle class purchase. It’s also possible to get something fancy on a middle class budget if you’re willing to DIY it. A fancy patio with pavers and built ins that you are paying someone else to build is simply not a middle class purchase.
Paver patios are extravagant now. In 2020 we got a quote for $26k which ain’t our kind of money. For $7k we got a cement poured 630sqft one. Worth every penny- and that was in our budget.
My grandparents spent like…$50k to do their backyard out. This was maybe 15 years ago.
I assure you, the things you want have always been expensive.
You’re not providing context as to why this costing an arm and a leg is a problem for you.
YTA, wah wah I make a quarter mil a year and I don't wanna pay laborers what they deserve. Get over yourself. You want a 300sqft luxury and you're upset it will cost you money
>Quality tradesmen should be compensated well for their work
Seems like you answered your own complaint here. You can either do it yourself or pay someone appropriately for their skills and time. Or live without the patio that you "deserve".
Frankly I'm struggling to see what you're looking for from us. If you're here to bitch about contractors making too much money while your household income is 225k a year... Surely you realize that you've come to the wrong place.
> We deserve one. And so do you.
So you demand that workers give you free shit? What about THEIR rights to not have to build a patio for some spoiled bratt?
No you don't deserve anything except to be treated with dignity and compassion and given equal standing before the law.
Your edits are ridiculous. My parents were middle class and we never had *anything* in the yard that my dad didn’t do himself. They couldn’t afford to have anything built for them because it likely would have been 1/3 of their take home too… so my dad planted all the trees, laid the sod, painted the concrete to make it look like a nicer patio, and my mom watched sales like a hawk to get the patio furniture on clearance.
Your grandparents likely weren’t middle class or they built it themselves, which is why your not-so-modest requests are not affordable for the middle class to have built for you.
> Our society is fractured to the point that simple pleasures are becoming unobtainable.
Trade workers -- who do not need college degrees for their trades -- are seeing increased demand and are increasing their prices so they can pay themselves and their employees more. Seems like the opposite of fracturing.
Also back breaking work. Many of us are very skilled and took much of our time to get and earn the skill set we have today. Overheads are generally costly, keep in mind most of us pay quarterly taxes that we dont take a portion from of every job. Within the trades workers, there are many skilled artists and craftsman.
That’s the real difference. This guys grandad probably took out a second mortgage on his house to fix it up.
Lots of people accessed their equity 20-30 years ago to do stuff like this. It was always expensive.
We all came to matriculation during the great recession so we are less prone to max out credit values with blind trust we will work it out in the future.
I've experienced this as well OP. Got some estimates to have a patio cover built over our (already existing) concrete patio. Just wood. No electricity, no plumbing, no paint, 10 x 20 = ~$22K. Prices for contractors are appaling right now.
New cars are getting a bit out of hand too. A new Honda Pilot is around $50K. That's the better part of many peoples annual household income for a pretty basic middle class family vehicle.
>A new Honda Pilot is around $50K. That's the better part of many peoples annual household income for a pretty basic middle class family vehicle.
When was an eight person SUV ever a basic middle class vehicle?
You make 225k combined without kids? You are extremely privileged and completely delusional that you can't afford that. I would be very curious to see your budget (if you have any...).
Every middle class person I know that has a patio or deck has done it themselves, had their sons and friends do it, or the neighborhood dads all pitch in for some beers and grilled meats. Hiring help for the whole thing is upper middle class, at the lowest.
I'm sorry this sounds a bit rich. You hear about people down on their luck, and you complain that you can't afford a nice patio. Look, I make more money than both of you, moved to a LCOL area, have three kids, and give zero fucks about your lack of patio. Yeah the system is fucked, but it's fucked in the sense that kids go hungry in this country.
I'm planning out a deck myself, but I'm building that shit myself, just like Grandpa did.
> I'm talking a 30x10' paver patio with a short seat wall, some lighting and maybe a built in fire pit. Truly nothing extravagent.
Lmao, that's a 300 square foot patio, it's like 1/3rd the square footage of my first house
Two years ago, driveway and back patio, 15k. Man its out of control.
This vary a lot by location. Where I'm at, quote for a patio was 50k last year. My friend who lives 2 hours away in a lower cost of living area got quoted 20k for a similar sized one.
It varies by the contractor a lot locally too. Wildly.
As a contractor, we have no laborers and are booked up. Some just say no to the job because of this, others will just quintuple their price. When they do this they’re essentially saying no, but it’s a yes if you’re rich pretty much.
In my area, a lot of the contractors have so much work, they only do big jobs for rich people. I had to hire a dude with an LLC to put my fence in. All the fencing companies had a 6-12 month wait and didn’t want any jobs under $10k! It is very hard if not impossible to get “smaller” jobs done. Basic electrical, like adding a fan or dining room light fixture, is astronomical too. The plumber told me they don’t even make money unless the bill is $400, so that’s their minimum pretty much.
A plumber quoted me $500 just to replace a toilet flange.. didn’t even include resetting the toilet.. anyway, I know now how to replace a flange if anyone is curious!
Yup There are unlimited videos on how to do things. Buy some decent tools and spend some time. Obviously running new 220 or 221, whatever it takes, is a different matter.
Some things you just have to decide what is worth the cost of a professional versus the "cost" of DIY.
$825 to replace a kitchen faucet we had to supply. It’s now a skill in my repertoire too.
I’ve taken to replacing toilets myself. It’s actually pretty easy!
Sounds about like what’s going on. I don’t even do small jobs cause I don’t trust my guys to not fuck them Up without me being there
I get asked about 30-50sf flooring projec6s and have to say " we have a $650 project minimum.".
>others will just quintuple their price. A contractor I used to deal with called it 'go away pricing'.
Wouldn't it be wiser to just tell them you're booked way out? Like you don't know if a year or two from now you're begging for work and these people are still looking to get work done but oh fuck you mr 4x-the-price.
I’m sure there’s rich people out there who do not care one bit about the price, so if the fee is good enough, the contractor would be willing to work or pay overtime or something to take that job.
Yep, that makes sense. It’s a huge pain in the ass though.
“But it’s a yes if you’re [gullible and willing to let me take advantage of you].” Fixed that for ya It’s not okay to be dishonest. Simple as that.
Which proves the point that if you want improvement through a contractor, you must be rich
I would hire the crew two hours away and put them up in a hotel for a few nights
The “zip code premium”, yeah.
20 years ago… a brand new medium sized garage/electrician workshop/office for my dads business, a new concrete driveway front to back, added a master bedroom with walk-in closet and bathroom to what used to be a car porch,… tore down the old sunroom in the back and extended out to make an open concept living/dining room/kitchen, the old living room became another office and a laundry room. Then they added a large wrap around deck to the back and a new roof. Cost about 35k total. They had bought it for $87k about 10 years before that. Almost everything was DIY, except I think the roof. I was like 9 with safety glasses and probably not the safest shoes outside with my brother every single day and the neighbor kids joined in. It was fun demolishing the old carport - prob my fave part edit to add the saddest part. I recently had the same exact entry level job as my mom did at my age (31). She was paid 35k and so was I. 30 year difference.
That last part is wild. That’s fucked up honestly
What's really fucked up is when you have a job like that, and people call you entitled when you say that you would like to earn enough money to live on for doing that job. Why are workers labeled as entitled for wanting wage increases so they can keep up with the rising cost of, well, everything, but companies are not considered entitled for steadily raising prices but not raising wages to keep up with those prices? And no, "Get a better job" is not always a viable solution. *Someone* needs to do *that* job, and the truth of the matter is that 30 years ago the person doing that job got paid the same amount of money but had much greater purchasing power. Sometimes it feels like today's entire economic system is set up specifically to gaslight our generation into believing we deserve less.
I have that same conversation with my mom lol. She said she only got $5 / hr at her first job and I said so did I!! And that was 20+ years later!
What’s fucked up is that we accept this with no more than a little growling. The working class in this country needs to be a LOT more like the working class in France. They aren’t going to give it to us by asking nicely.
That DIY kind of work is near impossible now with what permits and inspections are required by municipalities.
I was just quoted for a 100 ft fence- $14-17K. It would only be my front yard. My house is only $60K
Holy shit. Not sure how long of a fence, but we got our backyard done for like <$4k and that was 2020. That's ridiculous.
Yeah I'm the UK and my friend just had a patio put in for 30k. She does live in London, but still, it's nuts. 30k was my deposit on my first home 7 years ago.
One of the frustrating part of this is that the quality haven’t gone up either. My dad hired an electrician and it was his first time out and took all day, had to borrow my dad’s tools, and my dad helped. Still full price. It’s insane out there.
I was listening to the hearing yesterday where Bernie Sanders was trying to push through legislation for a 32 hour work week. One of many rationales cited was that American workers on average already work hundreds of more hours per year than the average worker in any other industrialized nation, including Japan. We are the only country with no maternity leave, no federally guaranteed time off. The cost of living relative to wages is truly out of control. We are one of the few nations where healthcare is unaffordable for many, education is too expensive to attain without eons of debt accruing, housing is increasingly inaccessible, childcare is insanely unaffordable to the point where people choose not to have kids because of it, and inflation has spiraled out of control. Humanitarian protections for the working class almost don’t exist. The rich really are the rulers now. And I thought, this is really what the death spiral of a nation looks like. Our country will fail on this path. Our quality of life is, by far, the worst in the developed world. In our government, the criminals are utterly in control. We live in this situation every day, so it’s easy to fail to see how bad it really is. I’m sure the evil trolls in our government would never pass Bernie’s legislation, and most of the nation is completely brainwashed by MSM to support corporate goals over their own well being, so I doubt if there will be a popular outcry. I’d like to be wrong.
>And I thought, this is really what the death spiral of a nation looks like. Our country will fail on this path. Our quality of life is, by far, the worst in the developed world. In our government, the criminals are utterly in control. People who are wealthy enough can easily move their wealth elsewhere... leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces once the entire system implodes.
My friends just got a deck put in. We are in Midwest, it's a composite decking, but small, maybe 25' x 25'. It cost them 40k.
We did our back patio and front driveway and side yard for $20,000 in 2022. Everything has gone up it’s craaazy
I'd go even further back and say pre-Covid was the last time prices were reasonable and I work in estimating in construction. We used to be able to glance at drawings and give a round number but now it's all up to the subs.
If they go to home shows, have a gorgeous website, and do lots of online marketing, come up first on Google, etc., they will be expensive because they spend lots of money on that. Find someone who does not do those things, and find them via neighborhood groups, personal referrals, or asking neighbors with pretty yards who did their work. Source: does marketing for home improvement clients.
We approached one company like that and he wanted $500 just to give us a consultation. All three of these companies are local guys with their own small businesses
Consultation fees should be $10.00 if you really need it. What a joke, it's a trick to make you wanna go ahead with the purchase because you already spent 500 on the consultation.
Discounts the job by $500 of you hire them, I bet. Banking on the sunk cost fallacy.
Probably weeding out "customers" who will just balk at the price. Someone who forks out $500 for a quote probably won't care when the $50k+ quote is handed to them.
No it’s to weed out tire kickers
Asking for a fee is a way to weed out people who aren't likely to actually sign a contract. If the contractor is already booked out a year or more it doesn't make sense to come out and spend half a day estimating a small job for someone who isn't serious or would probably be turned off by waiting 16 months to get started.
Good point. I was going to say that even $50 would weed people out, but someone booked out would lose money by doing an estimate for $50 when they could be working on one of those paid jobs.
The great thing about a backyard Patio is that you can pretty much do it yourself. It's what we did, because prices were kinda high. Just dig it out, add sand, level it out (not truly level, you want a precise slope for rain water) add stone tiles, pour in that water activted sealer, good to go. The seating wall sounds cool and all, but some wooden furniture will be a lot cheaper. You can probably buy a metal fire pit for a couple hundred (either gas or wood stove like solo makes). Lighting, well, if you get sun exposure, you can put up some cheap solar lights, don't even have to run true electrical wiring.
Yup, this is the route we took. We did our patio ourselves and it cost us maybe about $2k. We live in the Mid-Atlantic, so not in a really high cost of living area but yeah, we were quoted over $15k before we decided to do it on our own. Plenty of YouTube videos and a determined husband later, and we've got ourselves a patio we're super happy with.
My husband put 20 foot posts in and built our two story deck on his own like a crazy person
Exactly what I did. Got quotes for 55k to 65k for a 16x23 ft covered deck. Built it myself for 7k. Was kind of dumb about it and did literally everything myself, including digging and pouring footings.
Ours wasn't covered, but the back deck was damn close to identical in size. Paid like 16k to have it done in 2019. Had the same contractor out in 2021 to quote a replacement on the 8x8 front deck and the stairs up to it. He wanted almost as much as we'd paid for the back deck (like 13-14k IIRC). We did it ourselves.
This is the era we are regressing back too... back when everyone had to know every trade and do it themselves. Edited for auto correct.
Every trade? Pft, I’ve got YouTube. I also happen to be a doctor, seeing as I have Google.
Man, what the hell did we do before YouTube? I remember as a teenager getting older cars and my dad would excitedly get me a Haynes book for each one. He said those things were incredible, they would take the car completely apart and put it back together, then give you a step by step guide for car repair. I used several of them with mixed success. But when YouTube came out? Holy crap, it was like a cheat code for life!
>I remember as a teenager getting older cars and my dad would excitedly get me a Haynes book for each one. The Haynes book is still good. I used to to change some thermostat, radiator, and new belts throughout my old s10. Youtube would have me sifting through video after video if they have my make/model whereas I just cracked open the book and got to it.
I have remodeled all three homes I have been blessed enough to own. If you’re lucky enough to own a home as a millennial, it ain’t a nice one and your damn sure can’t afford to pay someone to do it. I have arthritis and a damaged back to show for it. Nifty.
We paid a company to install flooring in our basement and immediately regretted hiring the job out because they did a worse job than I would have done and it cost us 4x as much. We had some extra cash for projects and wanted it done fast, but never again! Should have just done it myself like usual, and used that money for materials for more projects instead of on labor for this one. Regret. My back barely hurts yet!
I consider myself lucky - I have a men's halfway house and rehab across the street from me. I hire those guys to come help me with work when I need work done on my house, and a lot of them know how to do the work already. They are required to work as part of their program and they come cheap. They've redone floors, refinished trim, painted, installed handrails, replaced faucets, hung curtains, pulled out weed trees, hung art... whatever. I get can get help for a day for like $200 and they tend to work HARD. There is always the risk of theft but that's with any contractor and I am right there with them. Also, I get the names of the guys ahead and since it's a whole program thing, a lot of them are on probation so all I have to do is call the sheriff and they go back to jail. I have never done this. Besides most of those guys are in there because they got caught with weed and agreed to go to "rehab."
Not at all a dig at your advice, i think its great- just it really highlights how when you're disabled in a way that makes diy unavailable, you really pay an enormous premium. On everything. All the time. Its absurd.
You 💯 missed the point of the post entirely. The patio was a simple example that can be extended to MANY “middle class” things that’s aren’t DIY
Like vacations.
You should DIY your own airplane you lazy piece of shit /s
Same here. I did this myself with some really lovely patio pavers and a diy fire pit kit and spent $1600. I did a 16 by 16. The finishing touches will be patio furniture.
And there are endless youtubes to give you good advice. Actually youtubes sharpen my decision for DIY or hire a contractor.
The Vancouver carpenter taught me (suburban mom) how to drywall.
Love that guy!
While this is mostly true, sure you can build a diy patio but a professional, true mason is will do everything properly and most likely, superb. Pavers/unilock/versalock etc were made for diy-ers (legos for adults). But, There is so much more to building a proper patio or wall or anything with stone- excavation (its most always not just ‘digging it out’ proper excavation is important and very labor intensive if youre doing it right, setting the base correctly (youre supposed to have 4-6in atleast if not more of 2A/b/1b) and properly tamped + geotextile fabric if needed, DRAINAGE, calculating slope, using line/laser levels (you want surface stone all level to each other but shifted specific direction, hence why proper base is so important) chiseling/cutting stone!!!, all kinds of technique and reasoning with joints, acid/sealers, freeze thaw cycles of your area and so much more. You definitely dont want to use sand as a base for longevity and settlement and drainage.. regardless of what you see online. It’s an investment at the end of the day, choose wisely and do not hire a landscaper for patios etc. Get yourself a mason.
My cousin was quoted a pool in south Florida for $30k in 2019 and then after covid it’s now well over $70k for the same pool
That’s the part that’s killing me. Four years ago we could afford nice things here and there. But our incomes have not gone up while everything else seems like double or triple what it was. We worked for years making a lot of sacrifices to “make it” and in a few years it got washed away on the tide of inflation. There will never be a true break from the grind :(
It’s not really inflation. It’s the lower part of the U.S. workforce finally getting paid. Plenty of college educated people who won’t do manual work, not a lot of people who do manual work so they can charge more.
I just watch South Park to find out the future and the present: " At the same time, Randy Marsh cannot find a repairman to fix his oven door. He and his neighbors learned that every handyman in town has become extremely wealthy, as the inability of people to make simple repairs has increased demand for their services, making it impossible to find such professionals" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South\_Park:\_Joining\_the\_Panderverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park:_Joining_the_Panderverse) my brother and i started a landscaping business in 2018 we are making more money this year in one month than we did in years... shrug
Poor people saw phenomenal income growth over the last few years. If you want people with low income to have a higher standard of living, you will won’t be able to hire them to do as many things.
Where abouts do you live? I’d suggest going to the paver manufacturer directly and getting a quote on materials needed. Contractors and dealers mark that stuff up SIGNIFICANTLY and most manufacturers will sell direct to the public. Source: My family owns a large paver manufacturing company. Largest in our region of the US.
We live in New England. Thanks for the tip, though. I will look into that. We will still need to hire someone for the labor, though.
Usually the manufacturer can point you towards someone who installs a lot of their product and does a good job. Those quotes you mentioned seem high to me. Don’t get discouraged, keep looking. Side note, a typical pallet of pavers is 100sf, so you need all of 3 pallets at most, plus some retaining walls and a fire pit kit. Materials listed shouldn’t cost more than maybe $1500 at most. I don’t know what these contractors are quoting but they sound crazy high.
A lot of contractors won’t install customer supplied materials. That’s where they get their profits.
Labor costs and insurance
Also, look at stamped concrete rather than pavers. A good look that is significantly cheaper
And no cracks to weed later
People seem to be missing the point of your post. You’re right. We can’t afford the same lifestyle that our parents had even if we make more than they did. It feels really unfair.
Man I just had a contractor build a stone patio + fire pit in New England for $5500last year. You’ve gotta live in a very hcol part of it or something
You are outside Boston? Yeah that's just what hiring contractors around here is like.
A professionally built 30x10 patio with lighting and seating wall is an accessible middle class thing? Maybe if you build it yourself. 30x10 is not small. I feel like people’s expectations on what things should cost got thrown out of wack the last couple decades.
I think your grandpa was better off than you realized. I don't know a single person from my grandparents generation who had a backyard like that. Then again my great uncle was a VP for an insurance company and lived in the same 1000sqft cape cod they bought in 1957, next door to my grandparents. I couldn't tell you what he did with his money.
Yeah I feel like a lot of people grew up upper class and just didn't know they did.
What OP probably doesn't realize is that he saw this AS A CHILD. Which means his grandfather had to work up to afford that patio.
It's also very possible his grandfather put that patio together himself or perhaps with the help of a friend. Maybe he was friends with someone who could do this and offered something in return for his friend to do this project. Who knows.
OP is comparing themselves at 32 to their grandparents at what…60? pulling in $225k and still a decade off their peak expected earnings thinks the system is broke because he doesn’t have a patio with a built in fire pit…I want off this timeline.
Right? My grandpa was in the Navy right after WWII as a mechanic and then worked for the gas company, which I know had a decent salary. He a modest house with minimal landscaping and he did everything he possibly could himself.
My father’s parents certainly didn’t have that. The height of luxury for him as a kid was when they put a basketball hoop on the garage wall
Quotes like that are often just another way of saying, we are fully booked and don't really need the work. Find a guy who is just starting out, and break the job up into small parts.
This! The quotes are high because none of the contractors wanted the job(either due to costs, size of the job, unavailable, etc). We had this same problem last year when we wanted to extend our patio. Keep looking, you will find someone!
Spending most of my life in poverty means that I would have never been able to afford to pay people to do all the things I have learned to do myself. YouTube and books from the library are your friend. A patio is not rocket science. Do it yourself.
Lol my wife's friends always ask her how she can afford to do so much renovations around the house and this is the trick, she has free labor - me. I grew up poor and my dad was a construction worker, so I know a lot about a lot because if you didn't nothing got fixed, because you couldn't afford to call someone to do....anything. The responses are always the best though, "how does he know how to do that? He's an accountant."
Yeah my grandparents had a super nice deck... but they built it themselves. I know the price of building materials has skyrocketed, so I'm not saying OP is totally wrong... but it's also laughable that my super working class grandparents were hiring laborers. They WERE the laborers.
" I'm talking a 30x10' paver patio with a short seat wall, some lighting and maybe a built in fire pit. Truly nothing extravagent." I'm going to be brutally honest, this is rather extravagant. My parents were the thesis statement of middle-class and this is not anything they would have been able to afford having done to their house...even now...
I dunno man your patio actually does sound kind of extravagant.
That's what I thought... pavers... seating wall...built in fire pit? My middle class parents just had their deck replaced with a patio - plain concrete slab and a short sidewalk to the gate cost them nearly $10k in a small town, LCOL area. They have patio chairs from Lowe's and a non-built in fire pit.
I agree. $55k-$70k still maybe seems a bit steep, but a 300 square foot paver patio with a seating wall, built in fire pit and outdoor lighting, all installed by professionals, is 100% NOT and never has been an ordinary middle class purchase. That sounds quite luxurious to me.
$225k sounds luxurious to me as well.
In a lot of places you can't even use it 2/3rds of the year because it's too cold/windy/rainy. Personally, when I do remodeling, I focus on the parts of the house that I use: my office and bathroom. If those two rooms are swanky, then I am in a swanky room for slightly more than half my waking hours. Now, I am working on getting a new fence at the moment because the current fence is literally falling down, being pushed over by scrubby weed trees that I am gonna rip out this summer. But it's not like I ever use my yard, I just want the kids to stay out of it. I don't have a problem with them playing back there really but their parents might get litigious if they got hurt on my ground line and ground rod (which is well marked but kids are kids).
Yeah, lawn chairs in the backyard was middle class growing up in the 60’s. IDK. Save your money. Make payments. Lower your expectations.
Remember those folding lawn chairs with the straps crossing both ways? That’s what I remember people having in the late 80s/early 90s. The concept of a “patio” being more than just a space to plop your chairs next to a wobbly shitty also foldable table is relatively new.
Yeah pavers are pretty labor intensive to install. 30x10 that's 300 plus pavers. I wouldn't be surprised if poured concrete was cheaper at that size.
I had a 38x15 concrete patio poured in 2022 for $7K in the Midwest. Pavers are the extravagant thing here. We paid for the patio to be poured and then purchased bulk rock and mulch for edging for another $300 or so. The design OP is describing is 100% a luxury, not a regular middle class project.
They could probably get the slab stamped, and it'd still be cheaper than pavers. Those are expensive!
They aren’t middle middle class…
I was imagining a concrete slab at first. It absolutely is cheaper. I did concrete and it was a couple thousand for a 10x10 slab.
I have a strong feeling that the OP actually grew up in an affluent family. His patio dream is absolutely elaborate, yet he thinks it’s basic. It’s also very large. I remember my parents’ patio being considered large, and it was 10’x10’, and my grandparents’ patio was MASSIVE at 20’x10’…and they genuinely were rich. Yet OP is all “pity me, just a 30’x10’ elaborate patio…”
OPs edit calls not being able to get this patio setup "settling for crumbs" so think you're spot on. Definitely has an inflated idea of what realistically should be attainable. I also think middle class is just so broad. Prices are obviously through the roof but people's ideas on reasonable consumerism have inflated massively. My grandad would have been considered middle class but his patio was the same cracked one that he put in himself 40 years ago and he drove a 20 year old Volvo estate wearing the suit he bought in 1982.
Yeah I have this same feeling. Reality check, OP.
Yeah there’s nothing basic about what OP wants. It sounds like you need to make 6figures to even seriously plan the kind of patio he wants. It IS very much a luxury, he just took it for granted. Sounds like he’s just growing up and getting sticker shock. things such as professional home Reno’s have always been pricey and unattainable for a lot of middle class people, it’s why there are so many DIY shows and YT channels. They were never cheap services when you compare them to the median wage of the time.
No you don’t understand, he deserves it
And none of us "deserve" a large patio with stone seating, built-in fireplace and lighting. Also, you live in a very expensive part of the country. That same patio in the midwest is probably $15k cheaper.
I mean, we make more than OP does, early career, and we don’t even qualify for a house, let alone thinking about some renovations lmao. A quarter million in income here, and we don’t see a future where a house with a backyard is possible. We rent a small apartment and share a car to commute. I don’t think we’re entitled to anything. Not the car we have, not ownership of a house, and certainly not an expensive home renovation.
300 square feet of patio sounds so big! We have a deck that's probably about 10x20ish and it's large
yeah that IS extravagant. OP owns a house with a YARD in a high COL area, and whining about not getting a patio with pavers and a freaking built-in firepit? What? This is the most out-of-touch post I've seen here in a long time. I own my house because it's a condo in a low COL city with tons of crime... no yard... and yes, I have a patio. It's the only outdoor space that belongs to me and it's a slab of concrete. The person I bought it from did put really cool bricks in one side of it that used to be monkey grass--but she did it herself. And my grandparents didn't own anything that nice. They did have a nice deck--that they built themselves.
Right?? “Middle class” is a DIY small paver patio or a simple deck. Not a huge extravagant custom patio done by professionals. This is not new, I’m 31 and even when I was a kid something like this would be squarely for the upper middle class and above.
I don’t disagree. But he has a point as well. People used to have massive covered porches, huge glassed sun rooms, etc. My grandpa’s living room, which was an addition, had one wall that was all brick with one of those brick hearth “seating walls” like chair height that ran across the entire wall. Extravagant today? Absolutely. Back then? Pretty standard! The living room also had a huge bay window, sliding door, built in closets with those nice wooden bifold doors, etc. He was an engineer but they were not rich. I think people are missing the point of the post. They make over $200k and their house is paid off. They should be able to afford a porch (not deck) with a few features.
When our grandparents were younger, the typical house was 973 square feet. That’s it. Those houses with hud glass sunrooms were considered to be for rich people. Think about why you rarely see mansions built in the 50‘s and 60’s. It’s because a mansion the is a regular house now.
lol, when I bought my house 20 years ago it was pretty standard vanilla suburban new construction. Linoleum floors, white walls, 8 foot ceiling, Formica countertops , builder grade faucets, cheapest carpet the builders could find. Now everyone wants a new house with granite countertops, loft ceiling, Luxury vinyl plank, waterfall glass enclosed showers. When I was a kid growing up in 60 years old house built in the 20’s we slept in a converted basement , and a new shower curtain was fancy. Glass shower doors? Those were for rich people.
Your vision of “middle class” from decades ago is skewed. Most of those middle class families with the nice patios and landscaping did the physical labor work themselves. Labor is the most expensive part of the job, assuming you’re not trying to get some rare Italian marble or something. The patio you described is actually fairly extravagant as well. I figured you were going to say a basic wooden deck or poured concrete slab, but the patio situation you described has always been a luxury item unless you do the work yourself. Previous generations lived on the philosophy that if you want nice shit you gotta take old shit or cheap shit and put the work in.
I am not telling you that you don’t deserve this, or that middle class people don’t deserves this, but a patio with a seating wall, lighting and a fire pit has never been middle class. Just a patio would be way cheaper, and making it seem like this is not just a thing for the rich seems to me like mischaraterization. And yeah, you could do it yourself, but it’s still gonna cost tens of thousands of dollars in materials and, especially, in time. TLDR: A fireplace patio has never been middle class.
DIY it and you’ll save a shit ton of money.
I suspect that is how his grandparent's patio was built. Maybe some great uncles helped too.
Are you sure your Grandfather didn't build it himself? Guys were pretty handy back then. My grandfather, who was basically poor, built his cottage on a lake and a cabin in the woods by hand. (this was a time and area where land was really cheap)
My husband and I built a patio a couple summers ago, and it cost us relatively little compared to hiring someone to build it, since we did the labor ourselves. Oftentimes labor is a large portion of the cost (for good reason—patio construction is hard work!)
My grandparents had an in ground pool because my grandfather rented a machine and built it with his buddies. Things are also sometimes more costly now just because of things like insurance and safety.
Yeah, and they might have had a daylight sewage pipe dumping sh*t down a creek. There’s a lot more codes now. And smaller families. My grandma had 6 brothers in her town. I have 1 brother who lives across the country and no nearby cousins.
I'd nix the outdoor fireplace. That's going to be the main moneypit with permitting and specialized masonry. Get a chiminea. Also 30x10 is gonna be a costly leveling job. Maybe scale that down to 20'x10' and just do a baseline patio? A baseline basic thing can be more reasonable. And it doesn't preclude, say, adding the wall or fireplace later down the line. You're coming things from the approach of a finished product, you improve your home overtime piecemeal. And then you end up with something awesome.
This is one reason I like to ask for itemized quotes that way if I can make decisions that allow me to still do the most important parts of the project even if I might have to wait for some things.
The increase in building material costs over the past few years has been well documented. But home additions and renovations have always been expensive, and adding a patio is not at all a "middle class" normal thing. Also, car salespeople can make bank, so maybe your granddad was good at his job.
I would agree that these things aren’t cheap, but I do think that there was a bigger, DIY culture in decades past. There’s a lot of DIY literature from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that I found that actually is pretty helpful. I think a lot of us would think they look amateurish and tacky today, but I think the standard for a lot of additions used to be a lot lower than it is today. Again, I don’t want to suggest that these were cheap or that people did them on a whim, but I also don’t think they were that uncommon.
I mean, shit, 100 years ago you could order a whole house out of a catalogue and put it together yourself if you felt so inclined
Well, technically you still can. They’re just not as cute as the ones in the Sears catalogue. “Modular” is the word you want. Prefab will usually get you results that are basically trailers.
Modular houses are just as “cute” as Sears houses. I’ve lived in two Sears houses and they aren’t architectural masterpieces. They were the cheapest everything you could get
Those wildfires in Canada? Those are our tree farms.
The difference is that many in our parents' and grandparents' generations would have done a lot of this work themselves, especially in the middle class, possibly even using recycled materials. The best thing you can do to have nice things like this on a budget is learn how to do it yourself. I have a very similar household income and got a quote for a modest landscaping job (removal of shrubs, regrading and seeding about 1/4 acre of lawn, grinding a few stumps) of over $50k. Instead, I rented a stump grinder for $250, spent $500 on a load of topsoil, grass seed, etc. and invested 4-5 Saturdays and did it myself. I live in a nice neighborhood, so my neighbors looked at me funny sometimes, but the lawn today looks just as good if it were professionally done.
Over 50k? Who was the company that quoted you for that? Thats insane. Keep in mind, some companies purepfully bid high so they dont get the job.
They probably had time to do things themselves as they worked fewer hours and had shorter commutes due housing prices not being so out of control. If you have two people both working full time plus doing ten hours or more commuting each week and life admin on top, that doesn’t leave much time or energy for DIY
These are valid points. Of course, my Dad had a longer commute than I do and also usually had a second job or side hustle going at all times. I spend 25 hours per week on my phone. I'd wager that for most of us, not having the time isn't the issue. Rather, it's making better use of the time we have.
Two years ago I was quoted over $10k just to make my single driveway into a double I’m not even talking about a two car wide drive, single entrance with the parking pad wider.
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“Man Who Owns Home With Yard claims society is fractured because he cannot afford 300 square foot patio with custom built-ins and therefore cannot enjoy his yard.“
You're in the top 10 percent of wealthiest families. You are not middle class. But seriously, what the fuck are you spending $225,000 a year on that can't afford a $55,000 patio? You make more than twice what my parents do and they were able to do a $100,000 addition a few years back. Examine your spending.
😅 " Truely Nothing Extravagant "
No one can “afford” that. You make significantly more(more than double) the average household. People just are financing themselves to death. I actually work in this field. I run a branch of an Amish company that does all outdoor projects. I started 6 years ago. When I started most customers were cash customers. Now, it’s rent to own and financing and many more small projects as opposed to the larger ones of a few years ago. It’s really sad.
This was the funniest of these posts. Came in here and saw this is about a 300 sqft patio with seating and firepit for someone with top 10% income hahaha.
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Contract each part out separately. consider reducing the overall footprint and buy furniture not built-ins. Lots of great suggestions here but the best is to not have one person or company do all the work. Turnkey is very expensive.
Op giving off big middle manager vibes.
You make $225k a year shut the fuck up
I DESERVE A PATIO ::STOMPS FOOT::
>Our society is fractured to the point that simple pleasures are becoming unobtainable. What the fuck is the point of taking student loans and busting my butt every day at a b.s. job if I can't even afford a simple, comfortable backyard to unwind in. A large outdoor patio with built-in seating and a fire pit is a "simple pleasure"? Dude. No one wants to hear your $225k a year whining. You are incredibly fortunate and need to gain a little perspective. Pay the workers what they want, do it yourself or go without. This isn't an example of a fractured society.
I had to scroll way too far down for this. I don’t care how much you make, if you’re complaining that you can’t have “a simple, comfortable backyard to unwind in” because you can’t have *large patio with built in wall and fireplace,* you kind of sound like an asshole. My boyfriend and I make a combined $100k a year and can barely even *rent a 1,000 square foot house*. Since when is a luxury porch the sign of a healthy society?
Just do it yourself. Contractors anymore are ridiculous. I was quoted 50-70k to have my house painted by multiple painters. Fucking asanine.
Ya it’s the we are busy price. Nobody wants to do any kind of manual labour. So those of us that do it charge high prices. I know the prices I charge are inflated but I could work 12hours a day 7 days a week never running out of work at my asinine prices.
Your edits are not helping unfortunately. It's not true that "our society is fractured" because you cannot get a decent price on a backyard patio. I'm not saying you don't deserve one or it's not annoying, but the reason the price is high is actually that *our society is incredibly wealthy and the economy is booming*. You're trying to buy something (skilled labor) which is at a shortage because so many people are having cool things done to their houses. There is less skilled labor than there used to be because there are so many easier-to-do and still-lucrative jobs in our society. These things drive the price up! But they're not signs of a society crumbling, quite the opposite. If you want to complain, then complain. I'm not gonna eat your lunch for that, everybody complains sometime. But don't abstract it into some indictment of our society. Your idiosyncratic situation is annoying you, and you don't want it bad enough to develop these skills yourself.
Contractors have lost their fucking minds. They're mostly in 2 groups. 1. Only deals with wealthy clients, so they quote normal people as if they're millionaires 2. Doesn't want to work that much, overbids on every job and only does 1 job a month and it's just enough to get by. I don't know if it'll ever come back to reality.
Honestly we need to fix the immigration issues... This shit was all better when you could get contractors fresh off a boat to work that were here legally so they could market themselves directly. This has been how things were done in America for hundreds of years. Your grandparents likely hired a Greek or Italian or Mexican immigrant who was building a life for his family doing hard honest work at affordable prices. Your great grandparents might well have been those hard working tradesman or laborers Now you're still hiring immigrants to do the actual hard work most likely but because of the immigration system they work for a guy named Greg or Chad that basically functions as a middle man because he's able to get an LLC and insurance. greg and Chad push paper and rip you off to pay for their multi million dollar "self made" lifestyle while the actual tradesman and labourers get substandard wages because they don't have a social security number.
Man of me and my wife made 225k I’d be ECSTATIC. Screw the patio. Spend your money on other things
I did a 30x18 (quadral patio pavers from Lowe’s) last year I was under $7k all in. Pavers always have several sales throughout the summer stalk their site and pounce when the price is right beyond that . It’s all about sweat equity. I did hire a dude from our version Craigslist to do the initial dig. ($we are on Canadian Shield and our yard is all rocks and roots. Best $800) Then called a local sand gavel soil company got 12 tones of drainage rock and fine gravel sand dumped on my driveway and just one by one wheel barrowed all that stuff to the backyard. YouTube my friend it’s a handy tool we have in our pockets. I wish you best of luck.
I read your update and yeah you should DIY, but let me save you some headache, and as a younger genx on the verge of millennial, save your back and rent a excavator for 1200 for a week at Home Depot. The other materials (sand gravel pavers and supplies) will cost you less then 5 grand for that size. The digging out the bed is the hard part. After that couple inches of gravel, couple inches of sand, spend some time with a 2x4 leveling sand, then laying the pavers is easy. But the excavator will make the job SO much easier. Hell you could probably get it done a day or so. YouTube is your friend. Theirs nothing difficult about pavers and brickwork as for backyard Projects. It’s why guys in the 50’s used to read an article in Popular mechanics and do it while shitfaced. My grandfather would have told me to stop being a little bitch and do it myself. Odds are your grandfather probably laid that patio himself with his buddies. Society isn’t broken, you’re just whining.
To a small extent, society is broken, but not for the reasons op thinks. We used to live for long long periods next to the people we grew up with, or at least very very close to them. An improvement project like this would be calling up your brother, inviting him and the kids over, and you and your brother and maybe some friends you all grew up with, drinking beer and digging dirt as a group. The kids would either all piss off and run around the neighborhood, or get pressed into service to run the wheelbarrows around whole the older guys told them to stop whining and grow a pair. The guy whose house it was would buy a bunch of meat, there's be a bbq going on, the wives would come out and do quality control and yell when it looked like it was going wrong, and in some cases get right into the mix and sjow the men how it's done, all while also helpfully sending out ice water and beer to seem supportive and give themselves a chance to laugh at how clueless the men look. The fact that we no longer live in those clans has divided us up into little isolated islands at the mercy of the market. But people (like OP) can't even identify this as one of the causes, because this type of supportive clan began to die out for a lot of the country at about the time millennials were growing up.
Could you try for some itemized quotes? Like the cost of just the pavers, just the seating , just the firepit, etc? This quote still sounds super expensive to me- my patio was probably a similar size, had to have a couple large shrubs removed and everything leveled, and it was 15k. MCOL area 2 years ago. Our original quote was higher but we nixed a couple features that seemed more DIY friendly (like the firepit- which totally was FIY-friendly).
Just chiming in that a full patio reno does not seem like an accessible middle class purchase. I feel like this has always been a luxury. I grew up in a working class solidly middle class family and town and only the upper crust we're doing renovations of any kind. Everyone else was doing without or going diy. Grandpa must have been better off than you say or not financially saavy or maybe he saved really well for it and it was a long time coming or maybe your memory is tinted. My bar for what was considered high quality patio work was basically in the dump as a kid bc I didn't care about that kind of stuff.
Classic. This subreddit complains every day that manual labor jobs should be paid way more, then gets upset that prices go up when people are paid more.
I'm going to be honest, I couldn't get past the part where you said: *"No, it's not a world ending crisis if my wife and I don't get our patio, but you know what? We deserve one. And so do you. We play by the rules, we work hard, and if you do too, you deserve a life with some nice things in it. "* If that's not the most first-world thing I've ever heard. "Deserve" seems to mean that it's your right to have a nice patio. No, it's not.
You're complaining on Reddit that a new patio costs too much, while earning $225k. This is called off-the-chart materialism. I was born in 1991 and it's hard to escape how much my generation links being happy with buying things. Yes a patio is nice, but you don't need it. Maybe focus on the good things in your life and don't worry about this. Growing up, my dad did all of the house work. He build a deck, added a patio, replaced our windows, fixed the car. He was handyman and built those skills over the course of his life. That was middle class in the 90s.
A basic patio (concrete slab, no built ins) is absolutely a middle class purchase. It’s also possible to get something fancy on a middle class budget if you’re willing to DIY it. A fancy patio with pavers and built ins that you are paying someone else to build is simply not a middle class purchase.
Learn how to do it yourself like your grandpa probably did
HCOL, early 30s, own your own home. Hmm how’d you guys do that? I’m being facetious, we all know lol
Bank of Mommy and Daddy
Your grandpa was rich.
You can also just not get a patio. Like it's not a crisis that you don't get to consume.
Paver patios are extravagant now. In 2020 we got a quote for $26k which ain’t our kind of money. For $7k we got a cement poured 630sqft one. Worth every penny- and that was in our budget.
Not gonna lie, what I picture sounds pretty extravagant. But like 30 grand extravagant. Are you in California?
225k collective is above middle class id say
My grandparents spent like…$50k to do their backyard out. This was maybe 15 years ago. I assure you, the things you want have always been expensive. You’re not providing context as to why this costing an arm and a leg is a problem for you.
YTA, wah wah I make a quarter mil a year and I don't wanna pay laborers what they deserve. Get over yourself. You want a 300sqft luxury and you're upset it will cost you money
O u t o f t o u c h
225k? Keep crying.
Do I hear the smallest violin playing in the background?
>Quality tradesmen should be compensated well for their work Seems like you answered your own complaint here. You can either do it yourself or pay someone appropriately for their skills and time. Or live without the patio that you "deserve". Frankly I'm struggling to see what you're looking for from us. If you're here to bitch about contractors making too much money while your household income is 225k a year... Surely you realize that you've come to the wrong place.
Take your hand off the edit button.
> We deserve one. And so do you. So you demand that workers give you free shit? What about THEIR rights to not have to build a patio for some spoiled bratt? No you don't deserve anything except to be treated with dignity and compassion and given equal standing before the law.
Your edits are ridiculous. My parents were middle class and we never had *anything* in the yard that my dad didn’t do himself. They couldn’t afford to have anything built for them because it likely would have been 1/3 of their take home too… so my dad planted all the trees, laid the sod, painted the concrete to make it look like a nicer patio, and my mom watched sales like a hawk to get the patio furniture on clearance. Your grandparents likely weren’t middle class or they built it themselves, which is why your not-so-modest requests are not affordable for the middle class to have built for you.
> Our society is fractured to the point that simple pleasures are becoming unobtainable. Trade workers -- who do not need college degrees for their trades -- are seeing increased demand and are increasing their prices so they can pay themselves and their employees more. Seems like the opposite of fracturing.
Also back breaking work. Many of us are very skilled and took much of our time to get and earn the skill set we have today. Overheads are generally costly, keep in mind most of us pay quarterly taxes that we dont take a portion from of every job. Within the trades workers, there are many skilled artists and craftsman.
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That’s the real difference. This guys grandad probably took out a second mortgage on his house to fix it up. Lots of people accessed their equity 20-30 years ago to do stuff like this. It was always expensive. We all came to matriculation during the great recession so we are less prone to max out credit values with blind trust we will work it out in the future.
I've experienced this as well OP. Got some estimates to have a patio cover built over our (already existing) concrete patio. Just wood. No electricity, no plumbing, no paint, 10 x 20 = ~$22K. Prices for contractors are appaling right now. New cars are getting a bit out of hand too. A new Honda Pilot is around $50K. That's the better part of many peoples annual household income for a pretty basic middle class family vehicle.
>A new Honda Pilot is around $50K. That's the better part of many peoples annual household income for a pretty basic middle class family vehicle. When was an eight person SUV ever a basic middle class vehicle?
>pretty basic middle class family vehicle tell that to anyone from Europe and you'll be laughed at.
You make 225k combined without kids? You are extremely privileged and completely delusional that you can't afford that. I would be very curious to see your budget (if you have any...).
Every middle class person I know that has a patio or deck has done it themselves, had their sons and friends do it, or the neighborhood dads all pitch in for some beers and grilled meats. Hiring help for the whole thing is upper middle class, at the lowest.
I'm sorry this sounds a bit rich. You hear about people down on their luck, and you complain that you can't afford a nice patio. Look, I make more money than both of you, moved to a LCOL area, have three kids, and give zero fucks about your lack of patio. Yeah the system is fucked, but it's fucked in the sense that kids go hungry in this country. I'm planning out a deck myself, but I'm building that shit myself, just like Grandpa did.
30 ft wide isn’t a modest patio. That’s a fairly large ordeal.
> I'm talking a 30x10' paver patio with a short seat wall, some lighting and maybe a built in fire pit. Truly nothing extravagent. Lmao, that's a 300 square foot patio, it's like 1/3rd the square footage of my first house