An extraordinary thing is beginning to happen in this country. DIY is becoming fashionable, it’s becoming trendy, it’s becoming something to boast about. Why? The reason is because thrift is no longer something that’s amusing and good in theory, but a bit Fifties and faintly uncool. It’s meat and potatoes again. Thrift is what will keep households’ in the red. So, as more and more people find themselves unemployed, two things happen. They have time on their hands, and they don’t have the spare money to pay other people to use things like mitre saws. The sisters are doing it for themselves, and its long overdue.
As you’ve seen from the links on this site a decent mitre saw, with which you can make clean, accurate cuts and do your skirting board or your shelves or your fitted cupboard, can cost as little as thirty pounds. Not very long ago a skilled carpenter, or chippy as they are chummily known, would cost you between £14 and £20 an hour. And that’s cash. In other words four mitre saws a day. Putting up a couple of rooms’ worth of skirting would take them two or three hours. They simply don’t turn up for less than two or three hours. So that’s sixty pounds, or eighty pounds you need to earn, pay tax on and get out of the bank in folding notes. People are doing the maths and they’re doing it themselves.
The days when a busy chippy could pocket the cash equivalent of an annual salary of £60,000 are gone. At the time of writing, you can get them for £10 an hour, and in six months time, you’ll probably be able to get them for about seven. In six months time, though, you may not have seven pounds an hour to spare. The truth about DIY is that people do it because they have to, and more and more people are going to have to.
Suddenly you look at paying a chippy to lay your floor, or fit a cupboard, and you realise they are costing as much as the cupboard. You realize that you could go onto some of the links on this site and buy the tools they bring with them yourself. You realize, in other words, that DIY is not an option, it’s a necessity. So what do you do? The answer, if you are like most people, is that you get on the internet, and you find out how things are done.
Of course there is a downside. If you’re putting on the skirting board for the first time, you won’t be as proficient as someone who’s done it all day every day for several years. The accepted wisdom is that the ‘finish’ is less polished when a DIY job has replaced the efforts of a real chippy and that can affect the value of your house for re-sale. But, realistically, how much will it be different by – 1% maybe 3%? All of a sudden, people are beginning to think that it’s a hit worth taking. The skirting is still on the walls, and they’ve got a brand new mitre saw in the cupboard!