DIY home improvement also appears as a strong theme in Perkins and Thorn’s (1999, 2001, 2003) exploratory study of the meaning of house and home in New Zealand. When interviewing 41 households in the Christchurch area, they found that DIY was a popular pastime among New Zealand homeowners – a relatively inexpensive method for transforming or ‘making’ one’s house into their ideal version of home. Their research also showed that while DIY is generally conducted by individuals in the privacy of their own home, such activities and the associated aspirations are influenced and shaped by a range of exogenous forces such as: the availability of tools and materials, the job market, housing policy and planning, house and garden lifestyle magazine advertising, and the local and global media (for this discussion see Leonard, Perkins & Thorns, 2004).
Worth mentioning here is the theoretical perspective upon which Perkins and Thorns (1999) based much of their work. Recognising that homes are special kinds of places, they set out to explore the possibility of linking theories of place-making with their empirical work on the meaning and making of house and home in New Zealand. They found that houses (observable material constructions) became homes (special kinds of places) as the inhabitants lived in, experienced and ascribed meaning to them. Particularly useful here is a similar point made by Schrader (2005, p.11) who, in a New Zealand housing context, wrote that:
…home has a social as well as physical fabric. The social fabric is the intangible patchwork of memories, emotions and experiences that we spread over the physical fabric and onto which new pieces are constantly stitched.
Drawing on Massey’s (1995) theoretical work – which considers that places are not static entities but “processes” – Perkins and Thorns (1999) suggested that our homes are always in process, being made and re-made by their occupants. They argued that individuals and families continuously adapt their houses and homes to accommodate their changing needs, wants and desires. In their words, “houses as material objects and homes as symbolic entities are shaped and reshaped by owners and tenants over time in response to both changes in the individual’s life course and the social context within which they are set” (Perkins & Thorns, 1999, p.124). Accordingly, the home exists in a perpetual state of flux – always evolving within an individual, local and global context – a project which is, therefore, never really finished. Pertinent to this study is that DIY is one way in which people change the physical appearance of their houses as they make them their homes.
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3.4. Chapter summary
This chapter has reviewed the international and New Zealand academic research literature on DIY. Four main themes (or approaches to the study of DIY) emerged. Firstly, I have shown that since the 1970s, a small cluster of quantitative studies of DIY have been published in the applied economic literature. Here, British and American economic theorists have treated DIY as a form of investment in the existing housing stock and have sought to identify and model the determinants of the decision to improve ones’ home by way of DIY or by hiring a professional. From this body of work it is possible to gain a basic understanding of the types of DIY projects done by homeowners and also the types of households who choose to carry them out. This work indicates that DIY is mostly carried out by younger homeowners and recent movers, and generally involves cosmetic work (such as painting and decorating) with more complex tasks left to the professionals. In these studies, levels of participation in DIY have been shown to change over the life course, with the frequency of DIY falling, along with the scale of the work done, with a corresponding increase in age.
Secondly, I have shown that descriptive survey data have been used to help understand people’s motives for doing DIY. This survey work has revealed a complex entanglement of lifestyle and economic drivers. Common across the research is that people engage in DIY because they want to; because it can be a fun social experience and personally rewarding.
Thirdly, I have shown that DIY has been examined through historical research, with British and American historians especially active in the field. They have sought to track the development of DIY (as a commoditised leisure form) since World War II, when the global DIY industry started to develop. In these studies, gender has often assumed a central position of importance, with DIY seen as a distinctly gendered activity, with the physical work (especially tasks involving heavy tools) viewed as a masculine interest. These historical papers have often been constructed around a reading of media discourses of DIY and which have tended to reinforce the notion that DIY is men’s work.
Fourthly, studies of DIY have surfaced in the allied fields of material and consumer culture, the activity providing theorists with an interesting lens through which to explore the nature of unique forms of consumption – such as ‘craft consumption’ (Campbell, 2005) and what have been described as ‘ordinary’ consumer practices (Shove et al., 2007). Apparent in these studies (and also many of the DIY histories referenced above), is the difficulty of precisely positioning DIY in the literature – commentators often referring to it as a composite of the
48 binaries of work and leisure and production and consumption. The New Zealand research literature, within which DIY has only been mentioned in passing, illustrates a similar tension, with DIY featuring in the New Zealand research on ‘work’ (e.g., Pawson & Cant, 1983) and also ‘leisure’ (e.g., Mansvelt, 1997a, 1997b).
Plainly missing from the international and New Zealand research literature covered in this review are studies examining the actual doing of DIY (the focus of the current study) which might provide an in-depth understanding of the DIY experiences of homeowners and which might also, in part, contribute to unpicking the ‘work’ versus ‘leisure’ and the ‘consumption’ versus ‘production’ interpretations. Before reporting the findings of my fieldwork, which may help to advance the aforementioned interpretations of DIY practice, the next chapter provides the necessary background context for the research – a history of DIY in New Zealand.
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