MODERN LIVING: The Shoulder Trade

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For many Americans, do-it-yourself makes possible luxuries that once existed only in their dreams. In Santa Fe, N. Mex., Joseph Wertz, a retired architect, lives handsomely on $3,000 a year by making what he wants, with the help of his wife Jean. Like many others, they have found a new source of happy companionship in doing tasks together. Working as a team, the Wertzes have built their own ultra-modern fieldstone house with a small swimming pool. They also turn out household dishes, vases and ornamental ceramics, belts, jewelry and furniture. In Hingham, Mass., Jozef Piekarski came home from World War II dreaming about a house far beyond his bankroll—a 17th century Cape Cod Colonial of shingle and red brick. Joe Piekarski has been working on his house for six years; it is still not completely finished, but it is snug, neat, and beginning to look luxurious. Its appraisal value already is $25,000. Cost to Do-It-Yourselfer Piekarski: $11,000. The difference, he says, "came out of my hide."

Sense of Accomplishment. Economic necessity was not the only cause for the boom. Housebuilders had more time, thanks to the five-day week, longer vacations and more holidays, and they had a new interest. In the mass migration to the trees and lawns of suburbia, some 7,000,000 people got houses of their own for the first time—and immediately set to work improving them.

Furthermore, the whole character of U.S. life has been undergoing a complex change. As mass-production techniques have broken jobs into smaller and smaller parts, the average American worker has often lost sight of the end product he is helping to build; his feeling of accomplishment has been whittled away as his job has become only a tiny part of the whole production process. In the same way, the meaning of the tasks performed by white-collar employees and executives often becomes lost in the complexities of giant corporations; it is hard for them to see what they are really accomplishing. But in his home workshop, anyone from president down to file clerk can take satisfaction from the fine table, chair or cabinet taking shape under his own hands—and bulge with pride again as he shows them off to friends.

Good Medicine. The therapeutic value of do-it-yourself is hard to overestimate. One Dallas doctor, a do-it-yourself addict himself, often advises patients to "go home and start doing things themselves." A harried executive who took up woodworking in his spare hours to ease the tension swears that it kept him from suicide. In Minneapolis an elderly dowager recently walked into a hardware store to look at power tools. "For your husband, Madam?" asked the clerk. "Good heavens, no," said she. "I want them myself." Her doctor had told her to take up knitting, but she thought woodworking sounded more interesting.