BALANCE DE ENERGÍA PARA SISTEMAS SIN REACCIÓN

Whether in their first home or beyond, all my interviewees could recite a list of the DIY projects they wanted to do in the home they owned, an inventory of projects they had developed and refined in an on-going household discussion about the way in which their property could be enhanced or ‘personalised’ (for a discussion of the home personalisation process see Porteous, 1976). Their thinking in this area was clearly influenced by a range of external stimuli, such as media cues promoting the latest home and garden fashions, and the ideas offered by close family and friends. David and his wife, for example, said that since purchasing their home they had spent a great deal of time reading the latest house and garden magazines and also talking together (and with family and friends) about how they could potentially reconfigure rooms, change colour schemes, fix things and suitably modernise the older parts of their house to reflect their own personal taste, style and lifestyle aspirations. Like many of the interviewees, they enjoyed these initial conceptual conversations, which were not usually bound by thoughts of affordability or available time, or by their DIY capabilities or resources. They were, in David’s words:

… arm-waving exercises, when you walk around the house waving your arms around trying to figure out what you can do with the place. And we’re always having those, thinking about what we can do and chatting about our big ideas with our circle of friends and Mum and Dad. I mean the place is reasonably tidy but there’s always a constant conversation going on in the

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house about the changes we’d like to make. In essence, you’re constantly thinking about the potential and that’s the fun part … before the DIY actually starts (David).

A similar perspective was put forward by Sally, who highlighted the continuous nature of the ‘arm-waving’ exercises that she and her husband carried out as they considered the changes they wanted to make to their first home – the DIY projects they could do together in order to realise their housing dreams and lifestyle aspirations. Like David, this process (the shared construction of an image of their ideal family home) was one that she and her partner enjoyed working through together, one which was also clearly influenced by fashion leads presented in the home lifestyle magazines36 which they subscribed to:

It’s all about the potential of what you’ve got and we do talk about it heaps, always, I mean we’re brushing our teeth in the morning and we’ve got our paint colours up on the wall and we’re like ‘oh, maybe we should have that colour’... Every day, we’ll be talking about DIY stuff and our dreams for the place and we’ve got all the house and garden magazines which I never thought I’d ever read. We just like sitting in our lounge chatting – ‘Oh, maybe we should fill in those cracks’, or ‘maybe we’ll just paint them and we won’t notice them as much’ or ‘maybe we can knock out that wall’ or ‘maybe we could change the garden’. We talk about that all the time really (Sally).

Shane also made the point that the envisioning of the ideal family home (developing the ‘big idea’ as he called it) and the associated conceptualisation of potential DIY projects, was something that he and his wife did together and thoroughly enjoyed, even if many of the projects they dreamed up together never actually got started:

…we’re always just sitting on the couch looking around and talking about DIY. Like it was during one of those [conversations] that we decided we’d re-fit the bathroom – put a new bath in and tile around the walls and put a new ceiling in, so it’s a bit lower down and it’s better insulated …all that started from one those couch conversations. Sometimes we talk about some big idea and say ‘that’ll be nice to do’, and then we’ll say ‘but we’ll never get around to that’. You know, dreams are free and it’s a bit of fun (Shane).

As is evident in these interview excerpts, among the couples interviewed, the imagining of potential DIY projects and the making of home was clearly an example of social interaction

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For an in-depth discussion on the influence of lifestyle magazines on New Zealanders’ housing aspirations see Leonard, Perkins & Thorns (2004). Also see Perkins and Thorns (2003, p.132) who use the term ‘dream-making’ in reference to the fact that while the material presented in home lifestyle magazines often describes what is available and where to get it, it also encourages the readers to dream and imagine experiencing living in the ideal family home. Also see Jackson (2006).

82 toward questions of home design and functionality. They were thinking of making a home together – a place built on the principle of ‘teamwork’, thereby representing a combination of the best of both their ideas (with strong discursive references to ‘us/we’ as distinct from ‘I/me’) (Figure 10, below. Also see Chapter Three, page 34 for a brief review of McElroy’s (2006) historical perspective on the teamwork exhibited by couples during the planning and execution of DIY projects. Bhatti and Church’s (2000) research on gardening is also helpful with respect to the notion of couples making ‘their’ home together).

Figure 10: Images of couples formulating DIY projects together (especially deliberating over which colours to use) are easy to locate in the popular print media. This example shows a husband and wife

team thinking about a look for their kitchen (The Press, 1960a).

Also, in the accounts provided above, references to the ‘potential’ of property were frequently interwoven with my interviewees’ narratives about the making of the ideal home – stories about what the dwelling they owned could become and the lifestyle that it ‘might’ afford. But perhaps more important in the context of this thesis is the central role they all imagined themselves having in the production of their perfect home – DIY designer, builder, interior decorator, etc. This positioning of themselves as the ‘maker’ of home is well illustrated in the following two interview excerpts, which also show that it is the idea and

83 challenge of improving a property with one’s own hands (a process of self-realisation) that is appealing for homeowners to think about:

You buy a house for the potential – it’s such a cliché word, but that is what you buy for, the potential. You can see that someone’s done a bad job of it and that you could transform it really easily yourself by just say stripping the wallpaper or painting it, or doing some other project you know, like you could chuck in a French door. You know, you can see in your head how you can improve it (Alan).

…we knew the place had heaps of potential. There’s not a lot of rotting or deterioration, so we knew we could easily make some improvements. We did a lot of thinking about what we’d do. I think the first thing we talked about doing was just painting the walls and doing the landscaping. We also talked about renovating the kitchen, you know, opening it up a bit. So we had a feel for the potential, what we both wanted out of the place and, you know, you’re always discussing those things, you know, thinking about the possibilities (Doug).

Over the course of my fieldwork, there was a lot of talk about the potential of property (or what was possible) and, pertinent to this thesis, an imagining of the things that could be realised through the carrying out of DIY projects. From these conversations, I distilled three main (mutually constitutive and often overlapping) ‘potentials’, namely: economic, aesthetic and functional37. It is to these potentialities that I now turn.

5.2.1. DIY and economic potential

My interviewees talked a lot about the economic potential (or capital gains) that could be realised, or ‘squeezed’ as one interviewee put it, from the property they owned by carrying out only the most astute DIY projects (i.e., avoiding over-capitalisation) and/or by keeping the dwelling in a good state of repair. This narrative was a particularly strong theme in the interviews I conducted with the younger first and second-home owners who saw DIY as one possible way to improve the value of their house; perceiving that the extra financial capital raised could enable them (like my older interviewees had done) to move up the so-called ‘property ladder’ – or housing ‘conveyor belt’ (i.e., using one house to achieve another house).

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This finding lends support to quantitative research which has suggested that DIY activity is underpinned by ‘mixed motives’ (see pages 30-31 for a brief discussion of these studies i.e., Brodersen, 2003; SIRC, 2003; Williams, 2004, 2008).

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…we came into this knowing that it’s the first step … it’s an old place with potential so we saw it as a chance to get onto that conveyor belt to get us up to where we can afford ‘that’ place (Terry).

Some interviewees put forward the view that because house prices had increased over time in New Zealand, it was logical that one should at least keep their house (where they had invested most of their personal equity) in a good state of repair, describing DIY as one way to protect and/or increase the value of their largest financial asset. In this light, the ideal (imagined) home was seen as a commodity with exchange value, one which was likely to increase over time and, therefore, if looked after judiciously by the owners, could provide a good capital return (currently unrealised). (For a discussion regarding the making of capital gains via the housing market in New Zealand see Wistanley & Wistanley, 2006.) As noted above, it was these potential returns through DIY that enabled younger homeowners to move up the ‘housing ladder’ while for many of my older interviewees, the capital they expected to raise (which could be realised upon exit from owner occupation or through ‘down-sizing’ in later life) had been earmarked for their retirement or for their children as inheritance. (For an in-depth discussion regarding the intergenerational transfer of housing wealth in New Zealand, see Arcus & Nana, 2005.) One of my older interviewees referred to the role of DIY in this process as “sweat equity” (Charlie) – the economic return possible from one’s investment of time and energy in the making and maintenance of house and home through the life course or, at least, over their housing journey.

5.2.2. DIY and aesthetic potential

Beyond the economic potential of housing, most of the interviewees – young and old – also talked about the aesthetic potential of the home which could be realised through a range of decorative home improvements – for example, a change of colour or new wallpaper to provide a specific ‘look’ or modern style (for more detail see the next chapter on interior decoration – Section 6.2, page 92). While the aesthetic potential of home was often connected to the owners’ desire to make the house more visually attractive (usually more fashionable) and, therefore, more pleasing for the occupants to live in, it was also associated with a strong desire to convey their style and good sense of taste to non-household members, especially visiting friends and family. The latter might be referred to as making the most of the home’s ‘symbolic value’ – the potential of the dwelling to say something positive about its owners – a marker of their sense of identity and style. (In the New Zealand context, the relationship

85 between home and the occupants’ identities also features strongly in the work of Perkins & Thorns, 1999, 2001, 2003 (see pages 45-46 of this thesis). The symbolic value of the home – or, the home as an expression of ‘self’ – is also a strong theme in the international literature on the meaning of home (but not DIY per se). For example see: Cooper, 1976; Kron, 1983; Madigan & Munro, 1996; Despres, 1991; Somerville, 1997; Moore, 2000; Wistanley, 2000.)

5.2.3. DIY and functional potential

The functional potential of the property was also a common point of reference i.e., the way in which certain additions or new configurations of existing spaces, could enable the occupants to (better) engage in a variety of desirable home-based activities. Examples include removing a wall to provide a spacious open-plan social space for better family interaction; building a deck as an additional outdoor zone for entertaining guests; or adding and modifying spaces to meet the requirements of a changing household (such as converting the bedroom of a teenager who had left home into an office space, or creating a nursery for a new baby). In short, this reflects the desire or need to make the best use of the property as a living space – what we might call the ‘use’ or ‘utility’ value of the property (although there is obvious overlap with symbolic value here, such as a bigger lounge expressing the fact that the owner is, or would like to be thought of as, an ‘entertainer’).

These imaginings were often related to one’s point in the ‘lifecycle’ (a point also emphasised in the applied quantitative DIY research reviewed in Chapter Three). For example, most of the younger homeowners I spoke to had a lot to say about the potential of the backyard as a space for an active leisure lifestyle for their young children. Hamish noted that one of the big reasons he initially liked and purchased his current property “… was because it had back-

yard cricket potential for the kids”. Barry, like many of my older homeowners whose children had “left-the-nest”, said he often thought about new lifestyle possibilities for the now unused spaces of the home, such as turning the back-yard, once his children’s cricket pitch, into a paved area with shade where he could sit “and read a book and relax”.

Important to all of these ideal visions of home was the consistent picturing of householders interacting in a place which they had built or at least fashioned with their own hands (through DIY) to suite their everyday needs and lifestyle preferences.

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