Endangered British Species: the DIYer

Profits at home-improvement stores are down as tinkerers and handymen and women are turning to paid tradesmen.

By Mark Rice-Oxley

from the March 28, 2007 edition

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When Paul Wootton needed to put up some shelves in his new Brighton seaside apartment, he figured there were two choices: Get out the power tools and start making a mess or call Dad.

"I could have tried, but it's a new place so I'm less willing to give it a go and botch it up," says Mr. Wootton, who confesses he has been calling on his dad's handyman skills for the best part of 20 years. "I'm always saying to him, 'Can you teach me how to do it?' but he just bangs them up quickly and is very good at it."

Give Wootton some credit, though. He is not totally hopeless when it comes to home improvement, or DIY (Do It Yourself) as it is universally known in Britain. He's erected some flat-packed furniture from Ikea and chalked up a minor triumph the other day by successfully hanging a picture. "There was already a nail in the wall. I just hung it on."

Fifty miles up the road, Laura Richards confesses she's not much handier around her flat. She can change a light bulb, she says, "though not the tricky halogen ones in the kitchen." But when it came to bookshelves, she paid a carpenter to do install them. Her generation, she says, has "too much money, too little time, and it's easier to pay for it than to do it ourselves."

Whatever happened to do-it-all Brits and their DIY pride? Where are the men with the full set of spanners (wrenches) alongside the masonry drill bits and screwdrivers in the tool shed? Where are the women happy to roll up the sleeves and get stuck into the wallpapering?

Surveys and data from the home improvement industry indicate that they are become British anachronisms.

Profits at big home improvement stores slumped last year; executives blamed the growing tendency of people to get tradesmen and handymen to do their dirty work for them. A survey last month found that more than 50 percent of people did not know how to wire a plug and more than three-quarters of people did not know how to wallpaper. The Ideal Home Show survey found that 62 percent of people were no better than Wootton when it came to putting up shelves.

And all this despite a flurry of television shows ("DIY SOS," "Grand Designs," "Changing Rooms," "House Doctor," to name just a few) in a country perpetually obsessed by home ownership and property prices.

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