Opinion: A Hard Lesson in DIY Economics

(July 28) -- When I was in the neighborhood of 40, I made a list of cool do-it-yourself goals I could set and achieve before my birthday, in the hopes of distracting myself from the blow of that demographic ton of bricks. I completed a few -- I planted a bonsai (it died) and took beginning Mandarin (I almost died) -- and completely missed others, like building a staircase for my Lab-shepherd mutt up to the backyard deck.

But despite the high failure rate and some derision from unnamed family members, I pressed on. And as a stay-at-home mom on a budget, it made economic sense. So I plastered, primed and painted. I replaced taps and installed light fixtures. I built a sturdy bookcase for my daughters. All this business of applying myself to learning and physical tasks has also been very Buddhist, very Voltaire, providing a measure of mental peace with which to rise above whatever petty blues might color my mood on a given day.

Until I crossed the bridge too far. Fix-it people will recognize the bridge as the one beyond which DIY becomes DI why-the-!@##-didn't-I-leave-well-enough-alone.

I own a glorious, decrepit Steinway upright piano, obtained for me, back in the days of positive cash flow, for about $1,800 through the classified section of my local paper. Built in 1886, it has that gorgeous, rich Steinway sound, despite dust, dents and zero refurbishment.

The Steinway's condition had been good enough for my weekend attempts at not-so-Clair de Lune, but with several keys that didn't play at all, it wasn't good enough for learning on. So before my 8-year-old started lessons last year, I went on a budget-conscious search for a tuner and repair person to fix the minimum required for all the notes to be playable.

Several repair sessions later, it was tuned and playable, though the amiable repair guy warned me that numerous parts were so old and brittle that if he tinkered with them too much, he'd end up breaking more than he fixed.

I wasn't prepared to pay for the consequences of that, so we stopped well short of perfection. He also recommended I sell the Steinway and get myself something that worked better: a wise financial decision, probably, but not one designed for me, a person in love with a pre-diesel engine artifact that's been American for longer than Montana has been a state. So I got only a few things repaired, and by golly I kept my Steinway.

But my daughter, who has signed herself and a friend up for a piano duet in the school talent show, was in need of a few black keys: specifically, the F sharp played by the left hand, just down from the middle C. It had stopped working in the months since the repairs -- one of the casualties the repair guy had warned I would face.

But I had my new middle-age scout-badge program going on, 45 minutes on my hands and a tight budget, and I was flush from recent success trimming my climbing roses. It made perfect sense: I'd repair the F sharp myself.

How did it go? Suffice to say my kid is practicing on a cheap electronic keyboard that I had to go out and buy, and I'm waiting for parts -- not just for the F but for an f-ing lot of other, newly broken keys as well -- from a seller on eBay.

I might have thought I'd save money taking a screwdriver to my antique Steinway, painstakingly made by expert craftsmen. But that's looking like a rather unlikely, and rather disrespectful, point of view right now.

Instead, my experience leads me to theorize that complicated DIY projects follow an economic law that one might call diminishing returns to complexity: The more complicated the DIY project, the less one saves in money and time with every additional step. The amusement of others, meanwhile, probably follows the inverse rule: The more complicated this gets, the harder you all will be laughing -- at me, not with me. My husband sure is.

Which leads me to the following anecdote. I told my piano troubles to a neighbor, who made me feel much better about the whole thing. That's because the conversation went like this:

She: "How are you doing?"
Me: "I killed my piano. I have this 124 year-old Steinway that my husband got me when we were first married ..."
She: "You've been married for 124 years?"

Melana Zyla Vickers is a former member of USA Today's editorial board, where she covered national security issues, foreign affairs and global economic issues, among other topics. She has worked at the Asian Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Globe and Mail.