Common DIY home-improvement projects include:

  • putting up shelves
  • painting and decorating
  • plumbing work:
    • replacing washers
    • replacing sink, bath or basin taps or fitting an outside tap
    • fitting a shower
    • extending or installing central heating
  • decking
  • building an extension
  • extending or replacing electrical wiring
  • automotive repair:
    • changing engine oil
    • changing spark plugs
    • fitting or replacing a car radio or audio system
  • Modifying or upgrading computer equipment, known as modding or tweaking.
  • Building a white box PC from scratch.
  • DIY audio/video equipment.
  • building/restoring cars, boats or aircraft

Do it yourself, often referred to by the initialism DIY,
is a term used by various communities that focus on people creating
things for themselves without the aid of paid professionals. The notion
is largely made possible by living in a modern industrial society, and is related in philosophy to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many modern DIY subcultures take the traditional Arts and Crafts movement’s rebellion against the perceived lack of soul of industrial aesthetics
a step further. DIY subculture explicitly critiques modern consumer
culture, which emphasizes that the solution to our needs is to purchase
things, and instead encourage people to take technologies into their
own hands to solve needs.

The actual activity of DIY goes back through the ages: since the
beginning of time, people have used their own abilities and available
tools and technologies to take care of their own needs, make their own
clothing, and so on.

The phrase “do it yourself” came into common usage in the 1950s in
reference to various jobs that people could do in and around their
houses without the help of professionals. A very active community of
people continues to use the term DIY to refer to fabricating
or repairing things for home needs, on one’s own rather than purchasing
them or paying for professional repair. In other words, home improvement done by the householder without the aid of paid professionals.

In recent years, the term DIY has taken on a broader meaning that
covers a wide range of skillsets. Today, for example, DIY is associated
with the international alternative and hardcore
music scenes. Members of these subcultures strive to blur the lines
between creator and consumer by constructing a social network that ties
users and makers close together.

There are various communities of media-makers that consider themselves DIY, for example the indymedia network, pirate radio stations, and the zine community.

The home improvement DIY scene we know today is actually a
re-introduction (often to city and suburb dwellers) of the old pattern
of personal involvement in home or apartment upkeep, or the making of
clothing, or maintaining of cars, computers, websites, or any material
aspect of living.

A comment by philosopher Alan Watts (from the “Houseboat Summit” panel discussion in a 1967 edition of the San Francisco Oracle)
reflected a growing sentiment of the times: “Our educational system, in
its entirety, does nothing to give us any kind of material competence.
In other words, we don’t learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to
build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely
fundamental things of life. The whole education that we get for our
children in school is entirely in terms of abstractions. It trains you
to be an insurance salesman or a bureaucrat, or some kind of cerebral
character.”

In response to this sort of insight, in the 1970s, DIY spread
through the North American population of college- and
recent-college-graduate age groups. In part, this movement involved
simply the renovation of affordable, rundown older homes. But it also
related to some extent to various projects expressing the social and
environmental vision of the ’60s and early ’70s.

A young American visionary named Stewart Brand,
working with friends and family, and initially using the most basic of
typesetting and page-layout tools, published the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog (subtitled Access to Tools) in late 1968.

The first Catalog and its successors used a broad definition
of the term “tools”. There were informational tools, such as books
(often technical in nature), professional journals, courses, classes,
and the like. And there were specialized, designed items, such as
carpenter’s and mason’s tools, garden tools, welding equipment,
chainsaws, fiberglass materials, etc. — even early personal computers.
(The designer J. Baldwin acted as editor for the inclusion of these items, writing many of the reviews himself.)

The Catalog’s publication both emerged from and spurred the
great wave of experimentalism, convention-breaking, and do-it-yourself
attitude of the late 1960s. Often copied, the Catalog appealed to a wide cross-section of people in North America and had a broad influence.

For decades, magazines such as Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated
offered a way to keep current on useful information. DIY home
improvement books began to flourish in the 1970s, first created as
compendiums of magazine articles. One of the earliest extensive lines
of DIY how-to books was created by Sunset Books, based upon articles
derived from the pages of Sunset Magazine in California.
Time-Life, Better Homes & Gardens, and other publishers soon
followed suit. In the mid-1990s, DIY home-improvement content began to
find its way onto the World Wide Web. HouseNet was the earliest
bulletin-board style site where users could share information.
HomeTips.com, established in early 1995, was among the first Web-based
sites to deliver free extensive DIY home-improvement content created by
expert authors to Internet users. Since the late 1990s, DIY has
exploded on the Web through virtually thousands of sites.

In the 1970s, when home video (VCRs)
came along, the potentials in demonstrating processes audio-visually
were immediately grasped by DIY instructors. As with television
programs, presentation could be dynamic and was not limited in the ways
that still photos and written text might be.

The DIY industry has grown markedly since the 1980s as DIY has
become a popular weekend pastime for people wanting to improve their
living conditions (and the value of their house) without the expense of
paying someone to do it. There are many DIY stores to supply materials
and tools.

In 1994, the HGTV Network cable television channel was launched in the United States and Canada, followed in 1999 by the DIY Network
cable television channel. Both were launched to appeal to the growing
percentage of North Americans interested in DIY topics, from Home Improvement to Knitting.
Such channels have multiple shows showing how to stretch one’s budget
to achieve professional-looking results (”Design Cents”, “Design on a
Dime”, etc.) while doing the work yourself.

Article from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_it_yourself

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