Everyone thinks working for yourself means lie ins. I have never had one on a work day in my life. The lie in is the thing you give up first, and if you are not willing to give it up you should stay employed, and there is no shame in that.
This is what a normal day actually looks like, without the version people post.
The alarm goes before five
Not because the job starts at five. Because the roads do not work later, and because I would rather be sat outside a house at ten past seven with a coffee than be somewhere on a motorway getting angry.
I eat before I leave. Every time. The men who skip it are the men buying a bacon roll and a can at half nine and then wondering why they lose the afternoon. The van gets loaded the night before, because loading a van at five in the morning is how you end up forty minutes away from the one thing you needed.
First hour on site is the best hour of the day. Nobody is awake, nobody is asking you anything, and you get more done before nine than most people manage all day.
The bit of the job nobody sees
Being on the tools is maybe two thirds of it. The rest is quoting, chasing materials, ringing suppliers who said Tuesday and meant next Tuesday, and explaining to someone very politely why the thing they saw online for a third of the price is a third of the price.
Quoting is the part that separates people who last from people who do not. Quote too low and you work a fortnight for nothing and resent the customer for something that was your own fault. Quote fairly, explain it properly, and be willing to hear no. I have lost work over price and I have never once regretted it. I have regretted taking work I underpriced, every single time.
Then there is the paperwork, which I do badly, in the evening, with the telly on. That part I will not pretend to be good at.
Lunch is not a break
Lunch is fifteen minutes in the van and it is usually whatever I made at five. I am not sat there being virtuous about it, I just do not want the two in the afternoon crash, because the afternoon is where the money is. Anyone can graft until eleven. Getting the same standard out of yourself at half three is the actual job.
The body takes it. Knees, lower back, hands. That is the real cost of the work and nobody tells you about it at twenty. The gym is not vanity for me, or not only vanity. It is the thing that keeps me able to do this at forty instead of being finished at thirty five. Strong legs and a strong back are not a look, they are equipment.
Why I still would not go back
Because I decide. I decide which jobs, which people, which mornings. If someone treats me badly on a Tuesday they are not on my list on the Wednesday, and I do not have to run that past anybody.
The trade off is that there is no floor. No sick pay, no holiday pay, nobody covering for you. If I stop, it stops. That thought used to keep me awake and now it is just the shape of my life, and I would not swap it.
People see the finished kitchen or the finished bathroom and they think that is the job. The job is the six in the morning, the dust, the ringing round, the standing in someone else's cold house in November working out how to make a wall that is out by twenty millimetres look like it was never out at all.
What is left at the end of it
I get home covered in it. Dust in the hair, hands wrecked, work gear that is not going anywhere near the good wash. There is a version of me that showers immediately and a version that sits down first with a drink and cannot be bothered, and honestly the second one wins more often than it should.
The customers you say no to
The ones who want a price before they will tell you what the job is. The ones who mention what their mate charged. The ones who describe the last three tradesmen as useless, because in about six weeks you become the fourth.
I used to take those jobs because turning down money felt mad. Now I know what they actually cost. A bad customer is not one job, it is a fortnight of your life, and you will do worse work because of it.
Saying no politely and early is the single most profitable thing I learned, and it took me years.
That is the version most people never see, and it is the one I like best. Whether you would prefer me cleaned up or exactly as I come off site is your business, and I have a fair idea which way most of you would go.