This sounded like an unfortunate story where a person had to do a lot of packing and cleaning at a building they resided in and they thought it would be a simple task before they left for a trip. Other people were worried that the person wouldn’t have much time and so they actually offered to pay for professional service so that the person wouldn’t have to worry. However, they declined as they thought it would be easy.
As it turned out, there ws quite a bit of space to cover and it was reaching to the point where if the place wasn’t cleaned up well for the next person they would have to pay a fine of some sort. Imagine that where they could have got professional services for free which would have solved everything. I know many times we like to be able to do things ourselves, but does it get to the point where it’s unwise not to take free offers like these that come your way in a put your ego aside fashion?
Another approach is if you are doing that simply because you don’t want to the perception of being a freeloader of sort just offer your own skills and resources to others whenever a good cause comes up as well. That might be better than purposely not accepting something you need as if it puts you in some kind of debt.