MODERN LIVING: The Shoulder Trade

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One successful Zion, Ill. jewelry-store owner, Wesley Ashland, cured himself of a nervous breakdown by building his own home. He got out in the woods, found a plot with a small ravine and creek, oaks, elm, hard maple and hawthorn. He drew his own design for an L-shaped ranch house, planned it so that he could save all but two of the trees. He built a bridge over the ravine with 340 bolted railroad ties, and laid a 350-ft. winding lane, bought saws, an electric drill, a jeep, and an old concrete mixer. He built a concrete and limestone house, worked through the winter in 10°-below-zero weather. Inside the four-room house all closets were cedar-lined, all screens and storm windows handmade of aluminum. He did all the plumbing, wiring and paneling himself. To him, the backbreaking work "is a relaxation." Now, at 60, he is healthier than he has been in years.

Lilacs on the Roof. But for beginners, do-it-yourself is often a painful succession of bashed thumbs and bruised egos. In their haste to build, they often take on complicated projects for which they have to learn a dozen skills, often find themselves in tragicomic jams. One enthusiast, who decided to build two bedrooms and a bath in his attic, put his wife to work tacking insulating paper between the room partitions and outside walls of the house. An hour later, when she tried to crawl out, she found herself nailed in between inner and outer walls. In Boston a do-it-yourselfer soaked his roof shingles in a preservative mixture of kerosene and 20 gallons of scented brilliantine, which he got from an aunt who was once in the cosmetics business. It worked fine, but for days the entire neighborhood reeked of lilacs. Another do-it-yourselfer indignantly returned a can of blue paint, complaining that she could not make it bluer. "What did you use?" asked the dealer. "Why bluing, of course," she replied.

After running into such trouble, some beginners give up and call in a professional. But most do-it-yourselfers are a hardy, bulldog breed, and constantly astound friends by their ability to overcome all obstacles. Prime examples are Sherman Bushnell Jr. and Charles Parke of Seattle. Bushnell is an $8,000-a-year sales manager for a local air-conditioning firm; Parke makes $5,000 as a grocery-chain accounting-machine supervisor. They set out to build a boat — a 30-ft. cabin cruiser that would do 15 knots and would normally cost $15,000 or more.

For $50 Bushnell and Parke bought a yellow, 16-ft.-by-32-ft. surplus tent, paid $49 for a set of boat plans, and got ready to work in Bushnell's backyard. The neighbors complained that the tent was unsightly, asked the boatbuilders to move. Undaunted, Parke and Bushnell started again in a spare room in a boatyard on the shores of Lake Union. Working three nights a week for nine months, they had completed the frame before they made a shattering discovery. Though thousands of jokes have been written about it, the two boatbuilders had made the classic mistake: the boat was too big to be taken out of the door. In dismay, they dismantled the frame, carted the pieces to a leaky shack near by which they rented for $10 a month, and started all over again.