There is a line from a Clint Eastwood movie that I often remember when it’s too late… “A man’s gotta know his limitations.”

I was reminded of this recently when a neighbor backed into our mailbox and broke the post holding it into the ground.

Several years ago, after our original mailbox post broke when the wood rotted through, I decided I would replace it myself, the right way. I mean, how hard could it be?

I deemed the best solution was to embed a pressure treated wooden post into a concrete base. It would be solid, durable and permanent. How hard could it be?

How hard indeed…

Not considering the facts that:

• I had never done this before
• I wasn’t familiar with the materials needed
• and I didn’t have the right tools to do the job

I pressed on into a half-day nightmare.

I didn’t have a post hole digger nor a proper shovel, so I dug my hole for the concrete base with a hand spade my wife uses for gardening. That took what seemed like forever.

In addition, I had never worked with “QUIKRETE” before. QUIKRETE, as the name suggests, is a quick-drying DIY concrete. And if you don’t know what you are doing, like me, it dries way too fast!

I had no proper tools to mix it quickly, so the QUIKRETE began to set before I even got it mixed and in the ground.

But, after repeated attempts, I got the post cut to length with a hand saw, mounted it in the quickly-drying concrete “before” it set, and attached the mailbox. It was a bit wobbly, but it got the job done.

I was never going to try that again! “A man’s gotta know his limitations.”

I’m a web developer, not a handyman. I must never forget that!

Last week, I didn’t forget.

Rather than try to do something, again, that I’m not qualified to do, we hired our recently-discovered handyman, Sean Wiley of Wiley Coyote Services to do the job.

He came out and installed a proper mailbox post, embedding it in a foot-deep concrete base in less than two hours. It’s solid as a rock and built to last.

Lesson learned. Do what I’m professionally-qualified to do and hire a professional to do what I’m not.

Sometimes it’s not easy though. We think we are saving some money by doing it ourselves. But are we really? The time we spend doing something we really don’t know how to do could be spent getting paid to do what we “are” professionally-qualified to do.

If you need a professionally-qualified Website Developer and Consultant, contact us today.

Then you’ll be free to do what you are professionally-qualified to do… run your business.