Human beings love to save a buck. We also love to have things done our way. It isn’t any wonder then that the do-it-yourself (DIY) philosophy has evolved from fad to mainstream and shows no signs of slowing down. The idea behind doing things ourselves is to create, modify or repair something without the hassle/expense of professional companies — not to mention bragging rights if the project turns out really well.
DIY moguls Bob Vila (This Old House) and Martha Stewart (Martha Stewart Living) are among the forerunners of DIY tasks like gardening, cooking and home improvements. Forget store-bought prom dresses and bookshelves; Bob and Martha will show you how to create these things with dryer lint and a bit of driftwood. Companies like Menards and Home Depot caught the DIY spark and fanned it into a flame. And the most recent DIY craze is Pinterest; think of it as DIY in pictures. Fueled by the ever-ubiquitous YouTube, DIY has taken a quantum leap from trendy to viral.
Sometimes doing it yourself is simply the satisfaction of being able to lord your accomplishments over your neighbor. My neighbor Jim built a tree house for his kids (and mine) to play in, a storage shed that housed every piece of lawn/snow removal equipment known to man and a garden drip system so intricate that I needed a chart to water for them when they went on vacation.
Other times doing it yourself just sounds fun. Remember Friendship Bread? You got a blob of ‘starter’ dough from your friend and kept it on your kitchen counter to ‘grow’. Every so often you ‘fed’ it with flour until it morphed into a bubbling mass that needed to be divided again. Eventually you had enough starter for 13 loaves of bread and 27 blobs to pawn off on all your other friends. That was the year everyone got homemade bread for Christmas.
Whether you view DIY as lazy or innovative, you have to weigh the pros and cons. Just as every exercise program comes with a warning to check with your doctor before beginning (to avoid getting hurt on the way to getting ripped) DIY projects should always fall within sensible parameters. Is the project going to take more time/effort/sanity than it’s worth? Are the materials accessible/durable? Are you going to be thought of as ingenious or oddball?
A few months ago a friend of ours asked my husband to help him move some furniture across town from their old house to their new place. They loaded the furniture into the back of a pickup truck and looked around for a length of rope to tie it down with. Since the old house was virtually empty the homeowner improvised. He dug around in his garden shed for a few minutes and came back out to the driveway with a bag. “Here, we can use these.”
My husband reached into the bag and pulled out a handful of pantyhose. He raised his eyebrows. “Do I want to know?”
Our friend explained that for as long as he could remember his mother used her old pantyhose for all sorts of DIY fixes around the house. When his mother passed away he discovered her stash of stockings and decided to use them for DIY projects around his own house. They were excellent at tying plants to stakes in his garden. My husband shrugged his shoulders and began tying lengths of hosiery together to crisscross over the furniture.
“I don’t know how women wear those things,” he told me later. “You wouldn’t believe how tight I pulled those stockings. They just kept stretching. I was sure they’d rip apart but they didn’t. It was like some sort of Redneck rope.”
Sometimes doing it yourself ends up with results that should be filed under ‘live and learn.’ My most horrific DIY memory is of a preacher who filled the pulpit for our vacationing pastor. He was an old-time, fiery speaker who spit into the microphone and shook his worn leather Bible at the congregation. He was a quarter of the way into a Hell-fire message when the unthinkable happened; his teeth began to fall out. One by one his top teeth bounced off the felt covered pulpit top until no front, upper teeth were visible in his mouth. While the congregation sat in stunned silence, he lisped an apology and explained that his dental bridge had come apart the night before. He knew he couldn’t see his dentist until Monday, so he glued his bridge back together with Elmer’s glue. Unfortunately for him, that brand is water soluble.
A wise man once said there’s nothing new under the sun. That includes doing it yourself. Archaeologists in southern Italy have actually discovered ruins from a Greek structure in the 6th century BC which indicate that it was built with coded symbols, much like an ancient instruction booklet, and was intended to teach others how to mass-produce building components and put them together in the same way. Wow. Move over IKEA.
http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/ancient-building-greek-temple-do-it-yourself-photos.htm
Lastly it’s always good to have a friend to bounce your DIY ideas off of. When I told my friend Debbie that I had a recipe for homemade mustard that called for 1/4 bushel of dried mustard greens she put her manicured hands on her hips and reminded me that I lived in Chicago. “You wouldn’t know what a bushel of mustard greens was if you tripped over it,” she said. She looped her Coach handbag over her arm.
“Cheer up,” she said, sensing my disappointment. “I’ll buy you a bottle of mustard myself – right after we stop at Starbucks.”
