> I despise this work (even though I do basic carpentry), and I fully consider it work that detracts from my life.

I felt that way when I bought my house too. My experiences:

Get used to the house never being fully OK. Things will continue to break, but over 90% of them aren't urgent. By the time I get one thing fixed (either by myself or by paying someone), something else is broken. That's OK. As time goes by, you realize that most of these things aren't really that important.

Yes, my toilet has a leak so I've turned it off for now: I have 2 others in the house. It's not urgent.

I cannot make ice in my fridge because the water hose to the fridge is leaking - had to shut off faucet. Am I going to chuck an otherwise good fridge over this? No. So for the past so many years, I manually add the water to the ice maker to make ice.

My over-the-stove microwave died. Twice. Am I going to rush and buy another brand new one? No. I'll wait till there is a sale. In the mean time, I can get a perfectly good used microwave for $20.

The list goes on and on.

If you want everything working all the time, then it will be a major pain.

Just learn how to find decent professionals/contractors, and learn to research prices before calling them.

I do a substantial majority of the repairs and maintenance on our cars and our house. It's a hobby of sorts, but it's also a real stretch to say that I enjoy it.

I do it because it's a phenomenal way to save money (and that savings is not taxed, meaning that if I avoid paying a contractor $5000, it's about the same financially as earning an extra $8500) and many of the jobs don't take an extraordinary amount of time or skill once I factor in the time required to get three contractors to actually show up and submit bids, choose the one I want to use, and do what project management is required to hold them to the standards we agreed to in the contract.

I don't know if you need to have interest in doing home repairs, but you need to have a willingness to do or to manage them.

Homeowners are at the bottom of the pecking order when it comes to contractors’ priorities. Property managers, landlords, and general contractors/builders can all give them more repeat business than homeowners can, so we get put at the bottom of the stack.

I felt the exact same way, I bought because I had a few rental properties in a row that would take us in, then kick us after the minimum contract length. Nothing to do with us, just selling, renovating and driving up rent etc.

I got so sick of moving a family with an energetic one year old, I just recently purchased a place. Now my extended family has come to help on the house and I’ve found the work surprisingly pleasing(where I felt I have always hated this type of work).

After so many years moving pixels around on a screen, physical work with a group of people is just, nice.

But that’s just me, I’m sure you very well might still hate it but I was pleasantly surprised.

I think it is still worthwhile, especially if you have an interest in privacy. In an apartment, a landlord is generally allowed to have reasonable access to the premises, can choose whoever they want to do the repairs, etc. They generally control the property.

With a house, even if you have all maintenance outsourced, you choose who performs the labor and when they do. My last apartment was horrible with surprise inspections, and I've had similar issues with them scheduling contractors at inconvenient or unknown times. It's much nicer owning a home even if you don't like doing the maintenance yourself.