and not uncommonly either. I don't think on average, hiring at random out of the yellow pages, that you will get a better job than a reasonably competent amateur. I think doing this stuff yourself, if you are the slightest bit talented at it, is a win from nearly every aspect: 1) you will appreciate how complicated and time consuming it is; 2) you will understand the installation intimately and be able to guess what is wrong, debug, and fix it later way more easily; 3) when things do not go quite as planned or spec'ed you will be able to regroup and redesign without 3 workers at $100/hr standing there scratching their collective heads.