This statement also hit home for me when I thought over my woodworking tools. I could buy finished timber for $300, or I could spend $500 on tools and several hours to finish $75 of rough-sawn timber myself.

We aren't doing these things to save money.

Almost never, in some cases you can but you need to be really in a nice and usually have access to the tooling for XYZ reasons. Then you would need to factor your labor cost, which is usually more than what would be billed normally in some cases...