From the ER and Comparative article....
When your job isn’t scalable by the hour — after a full week of work, putting in another 3 hours doesn’t earn you any extra — doing some of the household work such as painting the walls of your home yourself can make sense, because you can’t earn a higher pay rate on those 3 hours anyway. Substituting your own labor for hired labor saves money. The money saved contributes to your retirement pot, which helps you retire sooner.
It’s different when you retire early. If your retirement budget still requires a lot of your own labor in maintaining and remodeling your home, taking care of your yard, teaching your kids, fixing your car, and so on, you are basically giving up your job early in order to take up the job of a handyman/handywoman, a gardener, an after-school teacher, a car mechanic, etc. Unless you actually enjoy doing those work (teaching your kids can count as enjoyable), chances are you have an absolute disadvantage over the professionals in those jobs, and definitely a comparative disadvantage.
I think these points are overlooked in some of the comments, it makes sense to me. While working/accumulating at the end of the day it makes sense to DIY if you have the capabilities or desire to learn (there is a cost to learning), especially if you are unable to make more dollars otherwise.
He also provided the caveat of enjoyment of doing those things. If you enjoy, or in a more liberal sense get satisfaction from, doing those things and you are capable of doing those things then no need to pay someone. However, if the opposite is the case then I wouldn't FIRE until I had enough money to cover those things.
-What if you can't physically maintain your lawn, wouldn't it then make sense to be able to pay someone.
-I am sure I can teach my kids, but up to a point - pretty sure quantum physics may be beyond me.
Some of it also comes down to how you want to live in FIRE, I mean if you loathe anything of the sort and to pay for someone else to do it, then you just have to save up enough to cover it.
As an example, I have two large dead trees that need to come down - I can't do it, or more accurately I am not will to risk catastrophic damage to my house or injury or death to me - so I will let the pros handle it, and it will probably be $2-3k but no big deal as part of my budget I have $3.5k for home and maintenance (some years will be higher/some lower).
Separately, I also like Arebelspy's comment:
You are giving up what others value your time at, but you don't have to pay it.