What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?
Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
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Woodworking. You start with a few tools to fix things in your house, and suddenly, you got vintage handtools worth thousands of euros and you seriously speak of installing your "shop".
Lol,yeah,came here to say that.
Woodworking is extremely expensive and you don't recognise it early on. Even if you don't have vintage tools,etc. the sunken cost fallacy will fuck you over. And we are not even talking about expensive things like CNCs, tablesaws,etc.
And wood itself is expensive. My rather mediocre wood storage was ruined by flooding recently and the damage is way beyond 2k. Just fucking wood. Not even expensive wood. Normal wood.
Is it that expensive though? My dad has a table saw for 800 bucks, wuth the table allowing to put a mill tgat he got for maybe 400 bucks. The rest around is some general tools, a quality drill and drill stand, an air filter and a self made cyclone box for the vacuum. Top it off with some self made helpers like a a sledge for the table saw. The whole ordeal is not more than 4-5k and tgere is almost nothing he cannot do by himself now.
CNC systems are hardly needed for non professionals.
There are always different levels how deep you go in,but usually you also have a router or router table (between 0,5-1k including bits), a sander (0,5k with sanding paper), the workbench (around 1-4k), etc.
5k for just the basics is very reasonable and that misses the main thing: The bloody wood. Wood has become extremely expensive over the years, especially since the war started and if you do something that keeps you occupied 8h a week it will easily 1-2k of wood and other small stuff per year.
That is then around 10k for 5y of the hobby + optimistically speaking.
I wouldn't consider the wood as costs so easily. For instance we made furniture ourselves, like a bed, shelves, closets, stuff in the garden... If we would have bought the things instead, it would have been more expensive than the wood and other materials that went into it.
Of course the labor in this case is hobby, as it isnt competitive, but then again we got useful high quality stuff out of it, that will last a lifetime.
Depends on the furniture you buy,surely, but at least I have not been able to produce any furniture cheaper (just material costs) vs. factory build simply because they can cut more corners/get cheaper materials/can use techniques that would need more sophisticated equipment than I can.
Unless you compare it to massively and individually build carpenter furniture I always am more expensive (okay it's usually more solid and individual, though)
Yes you're right. The bed for instance was 300 € material costs using 27mm glued wood beech, wher you can buy stuff using plywood for cheaper. But it looks much better and will last much longer.
So in terms of quality it is somewhere in between factory and carpenter buildt. For furniture it is well worth it imo. and i couldn't find quality stuff for less than the associated material costs. Yet you can find a lot of plywood furniture that is way to overprized because "designer" or whatever.
5k isn't expensive to you?
Over ten years? not so much. Also if you have the space for the equipment, you usually have a middle class life.
I'm the middle of building that shop. I figure it will be done when I'm dead.