Mixing Home Recordings

Now, maybe I'm a lucky guy...(The fact that I haven't caught the sickness my fair lady has been coughing around the house for the last few days may be testimony to that), but I've never had a bad experience mixing tracks that have been home recorded.
Now, you don't have to throw a stone far in your average audio forum to hit a topic bemoaning the state of the tracks that an engineer has been sent to mix, but for me, there's a lot of reasons why I find it a lot of fun.

For starters, you're coming to the songs and arrangements with totally fresh ears.
You get to make decisions that aren't informed by hearing the song a load of times as it was tracked and overdubbed.
Quite often, I'll end up fairly judiciously using the mute button - more often than I would with a song I'd tracked myself.
Partly this is because of the temptation to throw a lot of shit at the wall when you've got the time that home recording affords to try different approaches and parts. Partly it's because I think you naturally get attached to parts as you become used to hearing them. Fresh ears mean you can make quick (and usually pretty good) decisions about what's helping the song - and what isn't.
Just by taking away an instrument that's contributing to overcrowding, or even muting it in verse one so that it brings something new to verse two, you can usually improve the feel of a mix before you even get in to heavy lifting with eq and compression.

A lot of the time, you'll be dealing with one guy or gurl who's getting their first outside perspective on their work. This alone can be very valuable. Mixing is a constant battle to maintain perspective, hence the widespread practice of switching between different speakers and headphones during a mix. Our ears automatically gets used to what they're hearing - good and bad, so the best way to avoid thinking a turd is shiny is to change your listening perspective every once in a while.
It's even trickier to maintain perspective on a song you've written, rewritten and recorded yourself.

Most of all though, I enjoy the big difference you can make to the finished mix.
It's a really good feeling when you can help someone enjoy their own song more because of the bit of mix glue you've applied to it.
And that's what it's all about - making dudes happy, and hopefully helping the songs be better at the same time.