Comment by runamuck
5 hours ago
I have a historic house with a hand carved/ uniquely shaped door. The jamb rotted and we paid a woodworker $4k to create a replacement. The door itself would easily cost $25k to replace. So, move to a major historic area with hand carved doors and you could make some decent money.
You assume there are enough of these jobs to go around and that you can just show up and do some extremely intricate work. Repairing historic doors and more elaborate woodworking isn’t easy to learn as the knowledge mostly doesn’t exist online anywhere, I also own a historic house and often ask the top tier LLMs for details e.g. about my staircase, they always give wrong answers as this knowledge is simply too exotic and not in their training set. And no one online talks about these things, 99 % of woodworking videos on YouTube are focus on beginners, you can’t replace a professional education watching videos and reading books. That will protect woodworkers with these skills of course but it’s wrong to assume you can just break into this market and be successful, most devs with woodworking hobbies are really shit at their craft and struggle to create even a regular elaborate cabinet, no way they will be able to compete with good craftsmen for these few lucrative projects.
you need some explicit /s in there, i'm afraid it's too dry
You paid $4k because it's a niche task that isn't much in demand.