The Real Cost of DIY Work Without Records
Home mechanics and shade-tree technicians who don't log their repairs face a specific problem when they go to sell a vehicle, trade it in, or buy parts for the same issue two years later: they cannot reconstruct what they actually did or what it cost. The brake job that took a weekend and two trips to the parts store is remembered as "brakes, maybe last year?" The head gasket replacement that kept the truck alive for another 80,000 miles has no record and therefore no value to a buyer who is trying to assess the vehicle's history.
The labor estimate field in this template addresses the comparison that every person doing their own work should be making: what would this have cost at a shop, and what did it actually cost me in parts plus time? An alternator replacement that took four hours and $180 in parts, against a shop estimate of $650, is a $470 save — a number worth knowing when deciding which repairs are worth doing yourself and which are better handled by someone with a lift and a factory scan tool.
The Two Fields That Keep Projects From Stalling
Parts on Hand and Done as boolean fields create a two-stage project state for every repair entry.
Parts on Hand separates the jobs you can start today from the jobs you're waiting on. Filter for Done = No and Parts on Hand = Yes, and you have the list of repairs that are blocked only by your time. Filter for Done = No and Parts on Hand = No, and you have your active parts sourcing list. Without these flags, every repair entry blurs into "that thing I need to do at some point," and the list becomes a source of ambient stress rather than an actionable queue.
Parts Needed as free text lets you record the specific part numbers, OEM versus aftermarket decisions, and vendor information at the time you're researching the job — before you've ordered anything and before you've forgotten the specific Dorman part number that was $22 cheaper than the dealer part for the same casting.
Repair Area locates the work within the vehicle system: engine, transmission, suspension, brakes, electrical, interior, exterior. Filtering by Repair Area across multiple vehicles or multiple repair cycles shows you where a given vehicle is consuming maintenance attention. A vehicle with four entries in suspension over 18 months has a different story than one with four entries spread across four different systems.
Labor Estimate as the Honest Number
Labor Estimate is the field that tells you what your time would cost if you weren't doing it yourself. For anyone who takes DIY maintenance seriously, this number matters: not because you're going to charge yourself, but because the gap between parts cost and shop estimate is the real financial argument for doing the work.
When that gap is small — a straightforward fluid service where a quick-lube shop charges $80 and the parts are $40 — the time equation looks different than when you're doing a timing belt service where parts are $120 and the shop wants $900. Logging both numbers per job, over time, gives you a real picture of where DIY pays and where it doesn't, specific to your skills and the vehicles you're maintaining.
Date Started paired with Date Finished and Repair Time captures the real labor input in a way that "a few weekends" never does. When you're three years into owning a vehicle and trying to remember how intensive the suspension refresh actually was, the record tells you it was 11 hours spread across two Saturdays, not the "couple hours" your memory has compressed it to.