Home Improvement in Aotearoa New Zealand and the UK

Rosie Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181807
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Design History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines experiences of home improvement in the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand, providing valuable insight into the ways in which people make and maintain home in social, material and economic context. Drawing on in-depth interviews, examining both DIY projects and projects carried out by professional handymen, Rosie Cox explores how home improvement fits into wider social relationships and structures of inequality. Consideration is given to the importance of such work for gender and national identities, and how these identities are related to material contexts and the forms and fabric of homes. The book also highlights how home improvement can be a rewarding and valuable form of work, as well as an unrewarding and alienating endeavour. It will be of interest to scholars from a range of disciplines including anthropology, sociology and human geography.

1 Introduction

The making of a building does not stop when the building work is (temporarily) finished, but only really begins upon occupation, when the work commences of maintaining the building’s integrity against an onslaught of wilfully destructive elements – insects, rodents, fungal infestations, corrosion, damp, harsh sun, water, wind.

(Carr and Gibson 2016 p303)

In order to exist, buildings have to be continually maintained. The work of making homes includes the inhabitants adapting to the building and adapting the building to themselves, working out how they will deal with the wilfully destructive elements, as Carr and Gibson (2016, drawing on Ingold 2013) so beautifully put it, and deciding what colour the kitchen walls should be in order to make them happy. Homes are constantly being made and they are made in social, material and economic contexts. They are made through routine, mundane repairs and iterative improvements, as well as dramatic renovations and building projects.

In the anglophone West, home improvement can be an important part of people’s lives. Each year Americans spend as much money doing up their homes as they do buying new ones (Harris 2012); US$322 billion was spent on remodelling by homeowners in 2019 (JCHS 2019a), when rented homes are also taken into account the total spend on improvements, repairs and maintenance was over US$424 billion, a growth of over 50 per cent since 2010 (JCHS 2019b). It is estimated that the informal renovations sector in Canada is worth CA$4.5–5.2 billion per year, with 200,000 people employed formally and perhaps 100,000 working informally in this sector in Ontario alone (Buckley 2018). A 2018 study among UK homeowners found average spending of £1081 on tradesmen, £203 on DIY as well as 104 hours of work on DIY each year (Independent 2018). Figures are similar for Australia with 62 per cent of homeowners carrying out some kind of home improvements either themselves or by paying tradespeople, up from 57 per cent in 2013 (Roy Morgan 2017). In Aotearoa New Zealand, with a population of only 4.8 million people in 2017, a huge amount of work was carried out on homes. It is estimated that in the 2000s New Zealanders spent over NZ$1 billion on tools and materials and in 2015 they spent over NZ$1.5 billion on renovations.

As people work on their home, or decide not to work on their home, they also make their relationships with others; friends, partners, children, and they make their ideas about themselves. Home maintenance exists within close relationships and wider social structures. It shapes the ways that families inter-act, and that national identities are made. Gender is a key aspect of this, in the anglophone West, gender defines DIY, but class relations and national identity are also important to the ways that people work (or not) on their homes, what that work means to them, and the pay and working conditions created for professional handymen.

In order to understand this particular way in which people make homes, this book examines experiences of home improvement in the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand. It looks at both DIY projects and projects carried out by professional handymen, based on interviews with householders and handymen in both countries. Like many home improvement projects as well as much academic research, this book began almost by accident. My interest in home improvement grew out of research I was doing on paid domestic work in the female-dominated areas of housework and childcare. I became curious about the extent to which (poor) pay and working conditions in that sector were related to the gendering of the work and the workers; would workers who replaced the unpaid labour of men in the home face similarly low pay? My research started by talking to paid handymen and households who had employed handymen in Aotearoa New Zealand, but very soon after I began interviewing, I realized that when I asked interviewees about home improvement work, alongside talking about gender, they told me about national identity and what it meant to be a Kiwi. They also told me about the ways that materials mattered to their sense of identity and to the meaning of home and the joy that could result from working on the fabric of homes and solving practical problems. This book explores these issues; it considers how home improvement work fits into wider social relationships, and structures of class, gender and national identity and the sorts of work that are created for professional handymen in these contexts.

Four themes weave through the chapters of the book. First, home improvement work can be important to gender and national identities, both at an individual level and in terms of government policies that shape ideals of home and family life. Second, these identities are related to material contexts and the forms and fabric of homes. Some homes are easier to work on than others, some people own houses which they can work on and others do not, therefore people have different opportunities to do home improvement and to use home improvement work to make valued identities and homey homes. Third, home improvement can be a rewarding and valuable form of work. It can be ‘soul satisfying’, unalienated labour, part of valued relationships, a way of showing love and care, of contributing to society, and part of a disposition to repair. Last, and seemingly in contradiction to this, home improvement can be a very unrewarding and alienating form of work. It can be frustrating, demoralizing, unpredictable, it can make men feel emasculated and women feel excluded. It can be dangerous, poorly paid and exploitative, meaning some handymen live in atrocious conditions unable to use their skills to improve their own homes. The cheap labour of precarious workers is a form subsidy to homeowners who renovate their homes.

In the rest of this chapter I provide context for the chapters that follow. I start with some definitions of terms that I use throughout the book, such as ‘DIY’ and ‘handyman’ to give clarity around these rather vague and broadly used expressions. The main part of the chapter gives a brief history of home improvement work in the anglophone West and looks at how responsibility for this work has moved between homeowners and paid professionals at different points in time. I begin by examining the rise and fall of DIY from the early twentieth century to the present day, locating DIY in wider contexts of productive leisure, changing ideals of masculinity and home. I then turn to the inverse of doing-it-yourself, the history of paid home improvements, the rise and decline of skilled trades and recent growth in the employment of handymen. In the last section of the chapter I give detail on the methods and context of the two research projects that this book draws on.

Defining DIY and home improvement

There are many different jobs that people do to look after their homes and a range of ways in which these get organized and executed. Throughout the book I used the term ‘home improvement’ as an umbrella to refer to repairs, routine maintenance, renovation, re-building, decorating and extending. Home improvement involves tasks that keep houses from falling into disrepair, such as keeping exterior woodwork painted so it does not let water in, repairs to the existing fabric of the home and alterations to materials and layouts. Some of these jobs are very small and some are much larger. There is no very clear break between improvements, renovations and construction. At some point the work of building a house morphs into the work of maintaining it. Many of the skills used in construction work are carried over in to repairs and renovations and many of the people who work in home improvement also work on large building projects.

The organization and performance of home maintenance is closely tied to housing tenure and housing type. In general, in the countries covered in this book, housing repairs and improvements are the responsibility of whoever owns the building. This means that when and where rates of owner occupation are high, so are the possibilities for home improvement by the people living in the house. Where and at times when renting is more common, people have fewer opportunities to work on their homes themselves or to directly employ others to do such work. Similarly, and this may seem like stating the obvious, the nature of housing makes a difference to how easy it is to work on. Where the owner of a single storey detached house might set to paint their exterior woodwork themselves one weekend, the owner of a flat in a high-rise block is unlikely, one hopes, to do so. In the USA the growth of DIY closely paralleled the growth of suburbs, as the number of owner-occupiers in single-family dwellings grew; by the 1950s there were ten times as many homeowners in the USA as there had been at the start of the century (Gelber 1997).

I differentiate between work which is done as ‘DIY’ and that which is paid for. The phrase DIY – do-it-yourself – is defined as follows by the Oxford English Dictionary:

Characterized by the carrying out of a task oneself as opposed to relying on or employing other people or resources; (now) esp. of, relating to, or serving the activity of decorating, building, and making fixtures and repairs at home by oneself rather than employing a person with professional qualifications.

(OED 2019)

The phrase was in use from at least 1910 to mean doing a thing oneself, but by the 1950s had its particular connotation relating to home decorating and repairs. Shove et al. (2007) argue that the contraction to ‘DIY’ is particular to the UK in the late twentieth century, but the OED has examples of ‘DIY’ and ‘DIYer’ from the USA and Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. The market research organization Mintel defines DIY as ‘repairs or additions to the home or garden, including installing a new bathroom or kitchen, central heating, putting up shelves, fixing a fence, building a barbeque etc’ (quoted in Shove et al. 2007 p43).

Richard Harris (2012) emphasizes that DIY is only DIY when there is a choice in the matter, he describes it as ‘a slippery term, which refers to a type of activity, a particular context, and a mix of purposes’ (p48, emphasis in the original). He goes on:

Clearly, it involves household members doing work that they could otherwise purchase as a service. ‘Could’ is the key word. Settlers on the western plains built, decorated, and maintained their own homes, but we would not normally say they engaged in DIY: they had no choice. The same was arguably true for immigrants who built and repaired their own homes in unplanned suburbs. At the suburban frontier, tradesmen were available, but immigrants could not afford to employ them.

(Harris 2012 p48)

While this focus on choice as a definition of DIY is not unproblematic, it is useful in highlighting the very mixed nature of DIY as both chosen leisure activity and householder duty. Harris’s definition also brings out that DIY is often done with other people, unlike the solitary activity that ‘yourself’ might suggest. Some authors differentiate approaches such as ‘DIT’ (‘do-it-together’) and ‘DIW’ (‘do-it-with’) to emphasize the communal nature of much ‘DIY’ work (Vannini and Taggart 2014).

The term ‘handyman’ has a longer history than ‘DIY’. First recorded in 1742, it originally referred to someone (a man) able to undertake a variety of manual tasks and domestic repairs, whether they were paid or unpaid. It now has the more specific meaning of a man who is employed to carry out domestic repairs and building maintenance, what was perhaps at one time called an ‘odd-job man’. Being a handyman implies a general level of practical skill and knowledge rather than a high level of training in a particular area. As with the category of ‘home improvement’ there are no clear divides between what is ‘handyman work’ and what is building work, with these differentiations often falling where there are regulations about who is able to work with gas or electricity and therefore creating distinctions between ‘registered’ specialists and generalists. This study was particularly interested in the work of handymen (rather than trained and qualified builders and electricians etc) because of their more direct substitution for the labour of household members, but many of the handymen interviewed were also specialists in an area of building. I also use the term ‘handyman’ throughout, despite its overt gendering, because this was the language used by participants in the studies and that is in common circulation. It should be noted that it is not a term that simply describes a workforce already in existence, rather it also influences who might join that workforce.

In my discussions of home improvement I focus in detail on the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand but locate the findings from research in these two countries more broadly in the context of the anglophone West (Australia, Canada, Aotearoa, UK and USA). While there are differences in housing forms and materials between these countries there are also some important similarities, most particularly high levels of owner occupation (often supported by government subsidies of various kinds) and relatively limited rights for private tenants. This means that in these countries there are large numbers of homeowners who have responsibility for the maintenance of their houses, but few people living in other tenures do. In Chapter 2 I explore in detail the relationship between the recent history of homeownership and possibilities for work on the home. Before that I look at the wider histories of DIY and handyman work, tracing how they have developed in the last century.

The rise and fall of DIY?

As discussion of changing definitions implies, DIY in its present form has not always been with us. What DIY is, how and why it is done and by whom have all changed over the last century. Historians and social researchers have suggested a number of factors which encouraged the rise of DIY, as we understand it today. In the early twentieth century, these range from patriotic duty, to a search for uncompromised masculine identities, the spread of the suburbs and the discovery of fulfilling unalienated labour in times of crisis. The impetus behind the rise of DIY is clearly complicated and not simply related to a desire to save money. There is no clear divide between home maintenance and housework, and as houses, and our ways of living in them, have evolved, so the line between what we think of as routine housework and home maintenance has changed. More recently DIY has become a political sensibility related to craft and craftivism, DIY organization, ‘tinkering’ and self-sufficiency. ‘there’s no question that a formidable boom in DIY literature is upon us’ (Wilson 2017 p15). When broader definitions of DIY are taken this is DIY’s moment, but it is also a moment household labour, from childcare and cleaning to gardening, dog-walking and maintenance is being rapidly marketized, with more of these tasks being outsourced to paid workers by more families than at any other time. To date attention has largely been on female paid domestic workers carrying out childcare and cleaning, but there is a slowly growing literature considering the marketization of traditionally male tasks in the home and a need to understand how paid and unpaid forms of the same activity relate to each other and to the people who do them.

Tracing a history of the rise of DIY is not a simple task; there is no linear development either of people doing increasingly more work on their own homes, nor the opposite. There have been times and places where DIY, as we now call it, has been the norm, and others when it has been rare. Steven Gelber sees the urbanization of the 1800s as providing a clean break in the practices of families around home maintenance in the USA. Previous to that time, when the majority of the population was rural, husbands, ‘had the knowledge and inclination to use tools on their own homes’ (Gelber 1997 p67). By the 1860s, in the USA, professionals were usually hired for even the smallest home repairs. It is as though the skills necessary to carry out such repairs had atrophied as men, at least those who owned their own homes, increasingly earned their livings in offices. Boys no longer worked by the side of their fathers on the homestead and traditional manual competence faded away (Gelber 1999). Such a trend was condemned by some, m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Making homes
• 3. Working with materiality
• 4. Doing it yourself
• 5. Not doing it yourself
• 6. Home improvement and national identity
• 7. Materiality, inequality and the homeyness of home
• 8. Conclusion
• References
• Index