DIY owners spend more than £4bn a year
Home owners are spending over £4 billion a year on do-it-yourself decoration, improvements and repairs - more than one pound in every five spent maintaining and upgrading owner-occupied property.
Research supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation finds that most DIY work involves decorating and small repairs. But as many as 40 per cent of owner-occupiers who carry out major improvements or repairs choose to do at least some of the job themselves.
The study was carried out by the Building Research Establishment Ltd. using data from interviews with 5,500 home owners for the 1991 English House Condition Survey. It shows that:
- English owner-occupiers spent £19.4 billion on upgrading and decoration work in 1991. Materials and tools for DIY work accounted for £4.1 billion.
- Nearly half the owners who had carried out major work (costing more than £500 or taking more than two days to complete) used a contractor for everything.
- Although only one in ten had tackled all major repairs and improvements themselves, four out of ten had used a mixture of DIY and contractors.
- DIY was more commonly used for decorating and upgrading property than for basic repairs. Some 40 per cent of new kitchens and 30 per cent of new bathrooms were DIY-fitted compared with just 8 per cent of repointing work to chimneys and 5 per cent of repairs to pitched roofs.
- Labour-intensive jobs were more likely to be carried out by DIY than those where the cost of materials was relatively high. However, the complexity of any task appeared more important in deciding whether owners used contractors or tackled the job themselves. more follows:
- Households where one occupant was a skilled manual worker were more likely than others to use DIY. Those working in the building trade were - not surprisingly - the most likely of all to do it themselves.
- One in eight households who carried out major works relied on unpaid help from family or friends to complete at least one job. Women owners and those with low incomes were especially likely to have received help.
Maggie Davidson, co-author of the study, said: "DIY has had important consequences for both the state of repair and overall quality of the housing stock. Yet do-it-yourself is essentially a leisure activity on which people choose to spend their time - and for a number of households DIY is simply not an option.
"That means there is limited scope for persuading more owners to take up DIY or to focus more effort on essential repairs. Initiatives to raise the quality of repair and improvement work - whether it is carried out by DIY or contractors - will have more impact."
