DIY Dreams and the Potential of Home4

DIY Dreams and the Potential of Home
By Layla Cani
Faculty of design and Arts
Abstract
In this paper you will be able to explore the reason of reconstruction and DIY
ideology. Home sweet home! Who else feels that a house is only a home when
it‘s filled with loyal friends and loved ones? I‘m excited to have
various renovation plans in the works for my home and for Khoollect HQ. I
want to make my home and workplace a fun, creative and positive space to
share with others, and of course, look as Pinterest-worthy as possible. If you
know me, you‘d know that there‘ll be patterned tiles, creative thinking and lots
busy people around while I‘m getting my DIY on.
1.0 Introduction
Matt and Lindsay Eidahl aren‘t afraid of a do-it-yourself project and their
home is proof. The couple purchased their 1960s split level — located on
a quiet dead end street on the northeast side of Cedar Rapids — 14 years
ago and have spent their days very creatively transforming every space
into their dream home. ―We bought the home from the original owners
who built it in 1965,‖ Lindsay said, recalling that the first project they did
as the new homeowners was pull up all the carpet in the home. ―We
found original hardwood flooring under all of it!‖

Figure 1
After the floors were revealed, a whole slew of projects followed.
―I design one room at a time, but I would say my style is eclectic, casual
and comfortable. Our home is laid back and it definitely has a flow to it,‖
Lindsay said.
―I just look at magazines and think ‗we can do this,‘‖ she said of their
DIY mentality paired with a farmhouse chic style. ―I‘m inspired by
magazines, TV shows, thrift shops, yard sales, and curbside finds. I really
see potential in every piece I come across. And I have had so many
people come to my house and say ‗no way!‘ when I showed them the
pieces I‘d made over.‖
That prompted Lindsay to start a blog called My Creative Days
mycreativedays.porch.com/, which she works on full time today. It‘s a
creative outlet for her to share her inspiration, projects and process and
help motivate others to create the home of their dreams without spending
tons of money. ―I get bored easily and it‘s an excuse for me to
redecorate,‖ she said. ―We have always done these DIY projects and now
I get to blog all about it,‖ she added, noting that the blog features room
tours, make over projects and DIY decor, a real peek into the Eidahl‘s
home.
―The reason we do what we do is because I am a firm believer that you
can have the home of your dreams without breaking the bank,‖ she said.

―Through DIY, repurposing and making over pieces that have tons of
potential, I can decorate our home just like I see in magazines and on TV
without spending a ton of money to do it.‖
And looking around the Eidahl‘s home — in person or virtually — you‘ll
find the evidence everywhere. There are handcrafted cornice boards
above the windows, cool old chippy columns mounted on the wall, and
rescued dressers refurbished with bold chalk paint colors in every corner.
―If you don‘t have a mantel you can just create one with some old wood,‖
Lindsay said, pointing to a shelf in the living room. And of course
they‘ve created faux shiplap walls, a nod to farmhouse style guru Joanna
Gaines.
―Thank goodness that Matt does so much of this work,‖ Lindsay said.
―He loves it as much as I do and deserves the credit on so much of this.
And a lot of our projects end up being so simple we wonder why it took
us so long to finally do them.‖
The kitchen was perhaps their biggest renovation project, as they
repainted their existing cabinetry, got new countertops and added a
backsplash. They also removed a small amount of cabinetry to add more
counter space. ―And this little bit of counter space makes all the
difference in the world,‖ she said. ―We also added a faux beam so we
could incorporate these great lights. You can make a light out of
anything.‖
The adjacent dining area is a perfect spot to gather for family dinners and
entertain guests. ―We added all these built-ins in the dining room from
salvaged cabinets,‖ Lindsay added.
The home originally featured a deck out back but the Eidahls decided
they‘d rather add a four-season porch to expand their living space, and
it‘s a space they completely transformed in the last year. ―I love all the
windows and the natural light,‖ Lindsay said, noting that it‘s a great spot
for a TV upstairs so they don‘t have to have one in the living room. Aside
from the new couch and rug, that make the room extremely cozy, every
piece on the porch was thrifted, she explained. ―My aunt was putting up
new fencing in her backyard and called to see if we wanted the old fence
pieces. Of course I said yes, so we got piles and piles of fencing. We
decided to put it up on the walls of the back porch and the rest of the
room grew from there. Oh and we pulled these green sconces from a
barn.‖

A matching larger pair of the lights found a home in Eidahl‘s downstairs
office, which is currently undergoing one of their famous
transformations.
When the Eidahls bought the house 14 years ago they didn‘t yet have
children. Now with two preteens, they‘ve managed to create a home full
of spaces to kick back and relax with family and friends, all within 1,600
square feet.
The downstairs family room, for example, is home to a comfy sectional
and a TV for playing video games, but also features a wall full of builtins
and a fireplace the Eidahls added to the home several years ago.
―Another draw for us in this home is that the windows downstairs are
larger and let in so much light,‖ Lindsay said. ―That makes a huge
difference in these spaces.‖
Also downstairs is the playroom, a functional homage to an old
schoolhouse. There‘s a nook — formerly a closet — that houses a long
art table for creative kid projects. There are vintage school maps hanging
on the wall and a huge old chalk board hanging on another. ―We‘ve
always had a toy room and its nice have a separate kid zone
downstairs.‖(Cliff Jette/The Gazette), 2017)
2.0 How to Increase Your Home’s Appeal
Remember the 60-second rule: That‘s all the time you have to create a
winning first impression. Here are some simple to significant ways to
maximize your home‘s appeal.
2.1 Exterior
Keep the grass cut and remove all yard clutter.
Weed and apply fresh mulch to flower beds.
Apply fresh paint to wooden fences.
Tighten and clean all door handles.
Clean windows inside and out.
Powerwash home‘s exterior.

Ensure all gutters and downspouts are firmly attached and
functioning.
Paint the front door.
Buy a new welcome mat.
Place potted flowers near the front door.
2.2 Interior
Evaluate the furniture in each room and remove anything
that interrupts ―the flow‖ or makes the room appear smaller.
Think mass appeal.
Clean and organize cabinets, closets and bookshelves.
Clean all light fixtures and ceiling fans.
Shampoo carpets.
Remove excessive wall hangings and knick-knacks.
Repair all plumbing leaks, including faucets and drain traps.
Make minor repairs (torn screens, sticking doors, cracked
caulking).
Clean or paint walls and ceilings.
Replace worn cabinet and door knobs.
Fix or replace discoloured grout.
Replace broken tiles.
Replace worn countertops.
2.3 Special Details for Appealing Showings
Turn on all the lights.
Open all drapes and shutters in the daytime.
Keep pets secured outdoors.
Buy new towels for bathrooms.
Buy new bedding for bedrooms.
Replace old lamps or lampshades.
Play quiet background music.
Light the fireplace or clean out the ashes and light a
candelabrum.
Infuse home with a comforting scent, such as apple spice or
vanilla.

Set the dining room table for a fancy dinner party.
Vacate the property while it is being shown.(Cory, 2016)
3.0 DIY house building in post-war Australia
In the period of reconstruction that followed World War II, Australians
experienced a severe housing shortage. The Commonwealth
Government's own wartime estimate was that there would be a shortage
of over 300,000 dwellings in 1947. While it collaborated with state
governments to build public housing, chronic shortages of materials, of
labour and an increasing population, meant that the demand could not be
met. As a result, many Australians found that the only way they would
get a home was to build it themselves - up to 30 per cent of all new
houses in the 1950s were owner built.
DIY home construction provided a tangible representation of a husband
and father's capacity to provide shelter. While women became involved in
planning, sourcing materials, labouring and project-management, men
undertook most of the heavy construction. At the same time, a significant
shift occurred in the way manual labour around the house was viewed.
DIY activity became seen as a pleasant and meaningful contribution to
family life and part of the solution to the potential feminization of the
suburban father.(BondCleaningInPerth, 2015)
The values associated with DIY and the practices of a new kind of
suburban masculinity were promoted in popular taste-making
publications such as Australian Home Beautiful, Australian House and
Garden, and ephemera published by the manufacturers of building
materials, tools and other commodities. This article uses these sources
and interviews with people, most of who were traced from articles about
their DIY homes, in local magazines.(CARTER, 2011)
4.0 DIY Competence and meaning in the practices in DIY
The values associated with DIY and the practices of a new kind of
suburban masculinity were promoted in popular taste-making

publications such as Australian Home Beautiful, Australian House and
Garden, and ephemera published by the manufacturers of building
materials, tools and other commodities. This article uses these sources
and interviews with people, most of who were traced from articles about
their DIY homes, in local magazines.
4.1 What is DIY?
DIY stands for ‗do-it-yourself‘
It occurs when homeowners decorate, alter, build, maintain
or repair any part of their home themselves,
DIY projects may range from small, simple, one-off repairs
through to major structural alterations requiring technical
information, building consents, design advice and/or a large
investment by homeowners in tools and materials
DIY is often framed as one part of the ‗informal economy‘,
in that it involves homeowners providing services for
themselves, as opposed to paying for them
It is a global phenomenon: big in New Zealand, but also the
USA, Canada, Australia and Europe, and emerging in Japan
and China
4.2 Theorising DIY
Emerging but disparate international literature – ‗gender‘ a
key theme
Economics: Economic determinants of the decision to do
DIY
History: Historical accounts of DIY movement in different
contexts (usually with a strong gender perspective); DIY and
―suburban husbanding‖ (Gelber, 1999)
Property/Housing Studies: Policy work: Home improvement
loans and the state of the housing stock
Retail Studies/Marketing: Purchasing decisions, consumer
behaviour and market research, particularly tools and
equipment

Social Science: The (domestic) division of labour (gender),
homemaking, identity (gender), material culture and
consumption, leisure and the meaning of house and home
5.0 DIY and the ‘Potential of home’
References to the ‗potential‗ of property were frequently interwoven with
our interviewees‗ narratives about the (imagined) making of the ideal
home: ―You buy a house for the potential – it‘s such a clichéd word, but
that is what you buy for, the potential. You can see that someone‘s done a
bad job of it and that you could transform it really easily yourself by just
say stripping the wallpaper or painting it, or doing some other project,
like you could chuck in a French door. You can see in your head how you
can improve it‖ (Alan).
6.0 DIY and the house buying process
DIY opportunities and associated evaluation featured strongly
during the house buying process
This indicates that DIY planning (or at least thinking about
doing DIY), starts early
The real estate industry frequently draw attention (in their
advertising rhetoric) to the potential of the houses they have for
sale or those properties suitable to buyers for those with the
nous for DIY
―Makeover dream‖ ―A blank canvas for the avid DIYer‖ ―SO
much potential!‖
7.0 The DIY ‘list’ – all participants had one
An ever-changing inventory of all the DIY projects the
homeowner(s) had dreamed-up in order to turn the house they
owned into their ideal version of home
The ―list‖ was discursively significant – a key feature of the
household language of DIY.
A process influenced by representations of (the ideal) home in
the popular media, personal observations and conversations
with other homeowners. ―Our list goes something like this:

we‘ll put the front fence up and then we‘ll go through the house,
painting it. And doing the carpets and flooring and electrical
stuff, and tiling if we need to, and then we‘re going to either add
a living room where the kitchen is. And possibly put another
bedroom on there. And then we we‘d have to move the garage
down the back. So there‘s that sort of thing. We‘ll put a deck
out the back, a garden out the back too with planter boxes, and
palm trees‖ (Sam). (Mackay, Perkins, & Gidlow, n.d.)
8.0 Home and Alice Vincent’s DIY TIPS: How to handle herbs
If you‘ve never grown anything before, herbs are the best place to start.
They are cheap, unthreatening and a pot or packet of seeds can be picked
up in a supermarket aisle.
Figure 2
It‘s easy to be taken in by the delightful-looking wooden planters filled
with lots of different types of herbs, but it can be tricky to keep them all
looking lovely if you‘re just starting out. Basil, for instance, needs far less
water than parsley, while mint and rosemary both like their space.
Shoving them all together in one vintage wine crate can be the equivalent
of a botanical Big Brother house – they‘re unlikely to all get along nicely.
So, you‘ll need to learn how to grow and look after everyday herbs that
look, smell and taste wonderful.

8.1 How long will my herb plants last?
While rosemary can live for years in the right conditions, basil,
mint and parsley are all treated as one-season plants, or annuals.
Although parsley and mint can return for another spring, it‘s better
to enjoy your herbs while they are in their prime and to encourage
them to keep cropping during their growing seasons, so consider
any extra subsequent growth a bonus.
8.2 The best way to pick herbs?
To keep your herbs bushy and beautiful, only take leaves from the
top of the plant when you are picking them. Look out for the tiny
new leaf nodules growing lower down on the stems and cut or
pinch off the stem and leaves that grow above them. This is called
‗pinching out‘ and it will encourage new growth outwards, rather
than upwards. If you just pick leaves from the side of the stems,
you‘ll end up with a plant that has long, bare, woody stalks and
fewer leaves.(Ebury Press, 2016)
9.0 DIY and the work of consumption
A search of academic bibliographic databases does little to help basic
understanding of what specifically counts as DIY. ‗DIY‘ crops up in
references repeatedly in relation to fields such as law, health and IT
maintenance, or in relation to anti-corporate counter culture. These
metaphoric applications of the term do serve to highlight the basic
characteristic of DIY which makes it an interesting empirical site for
testing theories of consumption. Across different fields of activity the
term is used to refer to people providing for themselves services which
they could otherwise (be expected) to pay a professional to do. However,
as reflected in dictionary definitions, the term conventionally refers
specifically to accomplishing home maintenance or modification tasks
without the paid services of a professional, and it is this field of activity
which is the focus of this paper. Across history and cultures, people of
course have maintained and modified their own homes, but the term
‗DIY‘, and the possibility of bounding a field of activity as a referent for
that term, is historically and culturally specific. Whilst the phrase Do-It-

Yourself has been found cropping up as early as 1912 in a US
advertisement, and reaching common currency in the 1950s (Gebler
1997), the unproblematic relation of the phrase to a definite group of
activities, and certainly its shortening to ‗DIY‘ seems particular to the UK
in the late 20th century. For example, although lifelong and second
generation ‗DIYers‘, a couple from the United States, respondents for this
project, had never heard the term before leaving the US.3 The near
invisibility of ‗DIY‘ in bibliographic databases reflects not just this
linguistic specificity, but a broader relative neglect of this field of activity
by the social sciences, despite its scale as a social phenomenon. This is
not to say that the neglect is complete. The following paragraphs review
the existing literature, before drawing out three key themes on which we
focus. A number of statisticians have paid attention to DIY and home
maintenance and improvement behaviours, based on rational choice
modelled analysis of large data sets such as the American Housing
Survey (Pollakowski 1988; Bogdon 1996; Baker and Kaul 2002) and the
Scottish House Condition Survey (Littlewood and Munro 1996). These
analyses provide useful background on generic correlates of decisions to
undertake home improvements and whether or not to employ someone to
do it. For example, Pollakowski (1988) finds a complex relation between
income and the likelihood of a household undertaking DIY, but a strong
correlation with age, and that renovations are most likely to be
undertaken by a recent mover (Bogdon 1996). Bogdon (1996) finds
household composition a major determinant of the likelihood of a
household taking on DIY, with multiple adult households most likely to
undertake it, single parent families the least likely, as well as finding that
people are more likely to take on a contractor where projects are of larger
scale, complexity or risk. Baker and Kaul (2002) highlights the
significant relationship of changes to household composition with the
likelihood of home remodelling.(Watson & Shove, n.d.)
Do you know what‘s great about DIY projects? Everything. When you
make items yourself, you can choose projects that suit your tastes, create
them in your choice of colours/textures, and then use them to your heart‘s
content.

Whether you‘re aiming for efficiency, decoration, fun, or self-sufficiency,
there‘s a awesome DIY project just waiting for you. Here are just a few
that you might like to try out:
9.1 Bird Feeder Wreath
A circular mold, wide ribbon, some birdseed, and some melted suet are
all you need to help feed our feathery friends over the winter
months.(lifehack.org, 2016)
10.0 Conclusion
This part of our larger study sits in contrast to 1980s
theorising which suggests that the increasingly privatised and
home-bound condition of urban residents is a symptom of
powerlessness and alienation in the public realm and workplace
Rather, in New Zealand, ‗home‘ is more typically a site of self
and collective expression and ontological security; and a place
within and from which strong social relations are established
Home is thus an emergent process incorporating elements of
aspirational fantasy, and for many New Zealand householders,
DIY is a very significant and enjoyable element of this process

References
CARTER, N. (2011). Man with a plan: Masculinity and DIY house building in
post-war Australia. Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, 1(2), 165–
180. https://doi.org/10.1386/ajpc.1.2.165_1
Cliff Jette/The Gazette). (2017). DIY dream home: Cedar Rapids couple
transform a 1960s split level | The Gazette. Retrieved May 27, 2018, from
http://www.thegazette.com/subject/life/home-garden/diy-dream-homecedar-rapids-couple-transform-a-1960s-split-level-20170311
Cory. (2016). How to Increase Your Home‘s Appeal - Utah Dream Properties.
Retrieved May 27, 2018, from http://utahdreamproperties.com/how-toincrease-your-homes-appeal/
Ebury Press. (2016). Alice Vincent‘s tips: how to handle herbs - Khoollect.
Retrieved May 27, 2018, from http://khoollect.com/discover/how-tohandle-herbs/
BondCleaningInPerth. (2015). 8 Important Areas to Prioritise During Vacate
Cleaning - Bond Cleaning Perth. Retrieved May 27, 2018, from
https://www.bondcleaninginperth.com.au/8-important-areas-prioritisevacate-cleaning/
lifehack.org. (2016). 30 Awesome DIY Projects that You‘ve Never Heard of.
Retrieved May 27, 2018, from
https://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/30-easy-and-awesome-diyprojects.html
Mackay, M., Perkins, H., & Gidlow, B. (n.d.). D I Y D r e a m s a n d t h e ‘ P o
t e n t i a l ‘ o f H o u s e a n d H o m e. Retrieved from
https://cdn.auckland.ac.nz/assets/creative/schools-programmescentres/transforming
cities/DIY-Presentation-Perth.pdf
Watson, M., & Shove, E. (n.d.). Doing it yourself? Products, competence and
meaning in the practices of DIY. Retrieved from
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.497.1467&rep=r
ep1&type=pdf