... On the average,
there is now one home workshop in every fourth home
in every residential block in America. To equip
these workshops, homeowners are buying 80 per cent
of all the hand tools sold by hardware dealers, and
are spending $100,000,000 for power tools this year
[1953], compared to $6,000,000 in 1947...
... All over the
country amateur carpenters, whom the professionals
commonly refer to as "wood butchers," are finding
they can save respectable sums by their butchering
and, in many cases, are thus able to make home
improvements or repairs they otherwise couldn't
afford....
Not only the high
prices but the shortage of skilled craftsmen is
encouraging millions of homeowners to under-take
such projects.
The old-fashioned
handy man or jack-of-all-trades has virtually
disappeared from the national scene, and the craft
specialists have been kept so busy on big building
projects that, quite understandably, they don't want
to be bothered with little jobs. You simply can't
hire them at any price.
But more important
than these economic reasons is our discovery of the
thrill and satisfaction of achieving things with our
hands. It is natural for human beings to do
physically creative work, and most of us who go in
for home craftsmanship or other manual activities
discover that it refreshes us in mind and spirit...
... I know a
prominent lawyer, Merrill Olsen, general counsel of
the Quaker Oats Company, who became interested in
home carpentry about three years ago, when a friend
took him to an adult class in industrial arts. He
was a simon-pure amateur as far as any mechanical
experience went, but he successfully completed two
or three minor carpentry projects and then undertook
to panel a recreation room in his home with knotty
pine.
Very wisely, he
went at it with great care and deliberation. Every
night he would sandpaper a couple of boards and
meticulously put them in place. Some nights he
didn't put up more than one board. As a result, it
took Mr. Olson two years to panel the room, but he
did a fine job. When it was finished he gave a party
to celebrate the event, and I doubt if he was ever
prouder of a legal triumph than he was of what he
had accomplished there in his home with his two
hands. Now, as you probably can guess, he is
engrossed in other building adventures.
Why does a man like
that, who could afford to hire all the carpenters he
wanted, mess around with sawdust and shavings?
The answer is, of
course, that he loves it and finds creative manual
work relaxes and replenishes him after mental work.
And it is for these same reasons, I'm convinced,
even more than the economic ones, that so many
millions of people are using their hands again.
Psychologists have
found that the surest cure for fatigue lies not in
rest, but in a complete change of activity. They
also say that, by working with his hands, a person
can more completely forget his worries than in any
other way. You can keep right on worrying while you
watch a television program, or even while you play
bridge, they add, but if you become engrossed in
manual work your brain no longer has room for worry,
fear, fatigue, and other kindred emotions.
As an illustration
of this, I recently heard Charles F. Kettering, the
General Motors genius, say that he once attended a
banquet and sat through several long-winded and
pretty depressing speeches. Listening to the
speeches made him feel so tired, he said, that when
he got home he took his watch apart and put it
together again just to rest himself! You may not be
as clever as that with your hands, but tinkering
with simpler things can be just as relaxing.
Since our mental
and physical processes are so closely interrelated,
virtually all doctors today recommend manual hobbies
for their purely therapeutic value, and not a few
do-it-yourselfers are motivated by health
considerations. Working with their hands, they find,
makes them feel better and increases their energy.
I have a friend in
California, a high-strung young professional man,
who used to suffer from stomach ulcers. He lived on
a miserable diet and was to dead-beat every night
that he had to spend eleven or twelve hours in bed
in order to carry on the next day. When a neighbor
suggested to him that he start a workshop in his
basement, the idea appalled him. "If I did any
physical work," he groaned, "it would kill me."
But the neighbor
finally got him interested one Saturday in a small
project—the building and painting of a flower box.
The ailing man found, to his surprise, that he
enjoyed tinkering with tools, and was amazed by his
own prowess when the flower box turned out to look
better than he expected. The next Saturday he
started making a dollhouse for his small daughter,
went on from that to other projects, and became so
fascinated that he worked on them evenings as well
as weekends.
Far from killing
him, this physical work has made a new man of my
friend. The last time I saw him he told me his
ulcers had healed, he was eating any-thing he wanted
to, and getting along nicely on eight hours' sleep a
night. Like thousands of other victims of our
high-tension civilization, he has found that home
craftsmanship is not only sound economy and a lot of
fun, but very, very good for him.
There are other
reasons for the tidal wave of do-it-yourselfism.
For one thing, most
of us have more time for extra-curricular activities
than we used to, because of shorter working hours.
For another, more than 50 per cent of all American
families now own their own homes, compared to fewer
than 40 per cent before the war. A family which
occupies its own home is naturally more interested
in keeping it in good repair and making improvements
than one which occupies rented quarters.
Thousands of the
new homes which have gone up since the war,
moreover, are particularly adaptable to expansion or
improvement by the amateur artisan.
Many of them have
unfinished attics where attractive bedrooms can be
built by anyone who is handy with tools, or basement
areas which fairly cry to be converted into
recreation rooms. Some of the less expensive new
houses are so uniform in appearance that their
owners go in for craftsmanship in order to give them
a bit of individuality by putting up fences,
trellises, cupolas, flower boxes, and other outside
adornments.
A changed social
attitude toward manual work is also partly
responsible for the new trend. Today it has become
smart to be handy. Not many years ago a white-collar
man was inclined to boast that he had never sawed a
board in his life, and many a woman bragged about
her mechanical helplessness and that of her mate. "I
simply wouldn't know one end of a screwdriver from
the other," she was apt to say, "and poor old Bob
couldn't drive a nail straight to save his soul."
But today the
reverse is true. Poor old Bob is apt to bore his
friends by boasting about how he tiled the bathroom
or built those concrete steps, and his wife gloats
to her bridge club about how she repapered Junior's
room or mended a leak in the kitchen drain with
nothing except an acetylene torch and a set of
plumbing tools. More than at any time since pioneer
days, it has become fashionable to work with your
hands, and some people are undoubtedly joining the
great do-it-yourself parade merely because they want
to be stylish and up to date.
Of course, not all
of those who go in for home craftsmanship make a
shining success of it. Every year many would-be
craftsmen start out with high hopes but, failing to
accomplish as much as they hoped, turn to other
hobbies. After observing hundreds of the customers
who patronize our lumberyards, hardware-dealers,
paint store, and other suppliers, I think that most
of these failures are attributable to (1) starting
on too ambitious a scale, (2) having no definite
plan to follow, or (3) failure to seek expert
advice.
I know one cocky
young homeowner who, without any previous
experience, attempted to build a garage. He bought
several hundred dollars' worth of power tools, laid
in expensive materials, donned a carpenter's cap and
apron, and made sawdust fly furiously for a few
days. But he failed to use one very important hand
tool, a level. As a result, his garage looked like
it was about to fall down even before he got the
framework erected, and eventually he had to call in
a contractor to straighten out the botch he had
made.
The young man's
mistake was that he tried to do too much too soon.
If he had started out by building a sawhorse, let us
say, graduated from that to a doghouse, and then
proceeded to the construction of a picket fence, he
gradually could have acquired the skill and know-how
needed to build a garage. But, by biting off too big
a project right at the start, he wasted both time
and money and lost much of his zest for
craftsmanship.
Power tools are
terrific labor-savers for advanced amateurs, and are
having much to do with stimulating the growth of
home workshops, but in my opinion the out-and-out
beginner doesn't need them any more than a baby
learning to walk needs a bicycle. The wisest course
for the average amateur, I think, is to start off
with just a few hand tools, and then buy power tools
as he has need for them.
The second mistake
which many beginners make is that of not having a
plan. Time and again, customers come to our yard
offices and ask to buy materials without having any
definite idea what materials they need or how they
are going to use them.
"My wife wants me
to put up a shelf about so long in the kitchen," one
customer said recently, extending his hands. "Can
you sell me the stuff I need to build it?"
The man had made no
measurements of the space the shelf was to occupy
and didn't even know what his wife wished to use it
for. If the shelf was to carry a heavy load such as
canned groceries or stacked chinaware, it would have
to be of stronger construction, obviously, than if
it was to hold light objects. But he had not
considered those points and he had no idea how he
was going to attach the shelf to the wall. Without a
plan, he was heavily handicapped before he started
to work.
But it is easy for
anyone to make a pencil plan of what he wishes to
do. If you use graph paper, you can draw an adequate
sketch without even using a ruler, and draw it to
scaled dimensions, so that the picture will look
approximately like the creation you have in mind.
Or you can buy patterns which help the amateur to
build hundreds of different household objects, or
follow plans in books or magazines which tell how to
make virtually everything from an ash tray to a
10-room house.
It is also easy to
avoid a third mistake of not getting proper advice.
Because they recognize the ever-increasing
importance of selling to the small consumer, dealers
in hardware, lumber, paint, and all other tools and
supplies are only too glad to give advice on how to
use their merchandise, and are re-educating their
sales personnel to be of greater service in this
respect.
In the lumber
industry, we have given more than 6,000 salesmen
30-day training courses to help them answer the
questions of do-it-yourselfers. We are even devising
a simplified vocabulary for the benefit of customers
who don't understand technical building terms. In
the hardware and paint industries, similar programs
are under way. To a greater extent than ever before,
you can get sound advice on how-to-do-it problems of
all kinds by merely consulting your dealer.
You can also save
money in this way. Many amateur mechanics buy more
expensive equipment or material than they really
need, and they could avoid this mistake if they
would tell their dealers what kind of projects
they're contemplating.
For example, I was
in one of our yards on a Saturday morning, not long
ago, when a man with a small boy came in and started
looking around in a rather bewildered way. He
finally picked out two standard-length boards of
beautiful clear pine of what we call "B and Better"
quality, but when he found they would cost him $6 he
looked crestfallen. It was easy to see he didn't
feel he should spend that much for a bit of wood.
"What did you want
the boards for?" I asked him.
"My boy and I are
planning to build a birdhouse," he said, "but 1 had
no idea lumber is so expensive."
"You don't need
that kind of lumber to build a birdhouse," I told
him. "Let's take a look in the 'Economy Corner.'"
I led him to a shed
where we sell odds and ends of lumber which has been
marked down in price—because it hasbeen cut back to
short two- and six-foot lengths. There the customer
picked out a few sound-knotted boards which were
just as serviceable for building a bird-house as the
clear pine would have been. They cost him only
$1.25, and he and his son went out wreathed in
smiles.
Similar savings
often could be made by many do-it-yourselfers in the
purchase of plywood, hardware, paints, and other
supplies. Most dealers are more anxious to win and
keep your good will than they are to make a quick
sale at a big profit, and, if you ask them, are
happy to point out ways in which you can be
economical.
I have mentioned
only a few of the mistakes which frequently are made
by novices. There are many others. In acquiring any
new skill, one has to learn largely by trial and
error. But I have observed that nine out of ten of
today's do-it-yourselfers are so enthusiastic about
their new activities, and get so much satisfaction
and relaxation out of them, that they take their
mistakes in stride, profit by experience, and move
steadily toward more and larger projects.
It isn't just as
individuals that we are benefiting from becoming
manual doers. In thousands of homes, parents and
children are working together at creative tasks, and
thus tightening the ties which hold their families
together. Nobody knows how many cases of juvenile
delinquency have been nipped in the bud by the
reappearance of home workshops, or how many divorces
have been prevented because husband and wife got
together to do some interesting work project.
All of which leads
me to believe that our rediscovery of our hands is
one of the most encouraging developments of the
mid-twentieth century. Men and women who worked with
their hands made America great. Now that we are
following their example, not because we have to but
because we want to, there is every reason to hope we
may become a happier, healthier, more stable people.
