In the UK, it’s hard to find a good builder, plumber, electrician that you can trust to do a good job, without it costing you a fortune. So it is no surprise that a lot of British people try to do it themselves.

DIY (Do It Yourself) has become a bit of an obsession in the UK, so much so that the hardware shops are now called DIY stores. And on public holidays, you can often find the queues to them causing traffic jams! Every year we spend over £7 billion of our hard-earned cash doing it for ourselves! This can be attributed to the wet weekends but probably also signifies our love affair with houses which runs deeper in Britain than in many other places in the world.

We don’t recommend that you take on electrical jobs in the house yourself without training.  However, if you just need to put a picture or some shelves up, why not DIY?

DIY stores

 If you are about to take on a DIY task at home, you will need to buy some materials. And because we English love our DIY so much, there are hundreds of places to go to find anything from a new plug for you hairdryer, to a new bathroom suite. Have a look at the "Find a.." tab for a selection of DIY-stores.

On most retail parks in the UK, you will find a selection of stores where you can buy everything you need for doing work on your home. But you can also get a smaller range of products at town-centre stores, where the prices are often a little bit cheaper.

If you plan to do lots of DIY, you might want to try online suppliers, many of which offer a vast range of DIY products. They are known for being great value and can be delivered to your door, often by the next day.

At these places you can buy both the furnishings and products you need for the home, as well as all the tools, and fixings you need to build or install them. Beware - a lot of the furniture you can buy in the UK comes ‘flat-packed’, which means you will have to put it together yourself when you get home!

Most of you probably will not be trained in how to manual jobs around the house. But don’t worry - in the digital age we live in, help is at hand!  There are some great websites which have comprehensive guides to all sorts of DIY tasks you might need to do.

If you search online for ‘DIY advice’ you will get a long list of sites which offer you support. However, some of the clearest and easy to use sites are those that are part of a retailers website. Often they have easy to follow drawings.

First lesson in DIY in the UK: wiring an English plug!

One of the first things it might be useful for you to know is how to wire a UK plug. If you hadn’t already noticed, British plugs are distinctly different than in the rest of the world. (If you have two-pin plugs on your electrical items, you will need to buy an adaptor before you can use them.)

Inside a UK plug, the live wire is brown (or red), the neutral wire is blue, and the earth wire is green and yellow. Don’t get them mixed up, and always wire them in the order shown in the diagram, below!

If you need to change the fuse inside the plug, make sure you change it for one with the same ampere rating. These range from 3 to 13 and are marked on the side of the fuse itself eg. ‘13A’.

Property 

The British love property. Go to a dinner party in the UK and you can guarantee that two subjects covered at length will be property prices and the weather. In fact the British probably care even more about these subjects than they do about who’s running the country. Just compare the TV viewing figures for the countless DIY shows to the number of voters at the last election, on average eight million versus a meagre six.

For Britons this is because the house is so much more than a just a home. It is an investment in their future, a pension, and a sense of having ‘joined the club’, ingrained in the British psyche throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when voting rights became tied to property. It is why Britain has the highest rate of home-ownership in Europe.

Yet the home is also a showcase, brought about because, unlike their European neighbours, the British do not socialise on the street. The changeable weather has created a culture where, instead of sitting in cafes and town squares, Brits prefer to invite guests into their homes. Dinner parties and barbeques are the UK social events of choice, and this naturally creates a need amongst Brits to ensure that their homes are maintained to high enough standards to impress their frequent guests.

The result of this is a nation that spends countless hours of its free-time sawing, painting, drilling and grouting, with each homeowner trying to out-do their neighbours with the latest designer sink unit or contemporary cabinet. Status can be gained or lost depending on the quality of your soft furnishings or the gradient of your patio-decking.

It even drives the type of property that Britons crave. The DIY gene inherent amongst many Britons has seen the popularity of individual houses soar at the expense of continental high-rise living. Given the choice between a bright and spacious contemporary high-rise flat, with communal swimming pool, and a modest Victorian terraced house with front and back garden, most Brits will opt for the latter. Why? Because apart from the, very un-British, lack of privacy afforded by communal living, it is simply not possible to smash down walls, build extensions and essentially personalise the dwellings where they will be spending the vast majority of their time outside of work.

And, of course, there is the famous English garden, where summers are spent pruning hedges and building water-features, sung about by every British band from the Beatles to Oasis. The garden is to the British what good food is to the French, and, just like their houses, they love them so much that instead of slow walks through town-centres, they would rather go home, close the front door, and do-it-for-themselves.

By Matt Taylor and John Hillman

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USEFUL WORDS

DIY Equipment

screwdriver

hammer

spanner

pliers

nail

bolt

screw

nut

chisel

plane

saw

paint brush

DIY Projects

wallpapering

painting walls

installing wood panelling
adding new flooring (e.g. carpets, tiling, linoleum (lino), wood flooring)
changing plugs and plug sockets
upgrading cabinets, fixtures and sinks in the kitchen and bathroom
replacing windows and doors

improving the garden with sliding doors, wooden patio decks, patio gardens and fencing

upgrading heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems
repairing plumbing and electrical systems
waterproofing the basement

soundproofing rooms, especially bedrooms

replacing the roof

extending one's house with rooms added to the side of the house or, sometimes, extra levels to the original roof

fitting a new kitchen or bathroom
improving energy efficiency with double-glazed windows and a condensing boiler

GRAMMAR SPOT

To have/get something done

Use the causative have to…

…say that somebody does something for you:

I have my windows cleaned every month (= somebody cleans them for you, you don’t clean them)

We’re getting a new kitchen fitted in January (someone is going to do the work for you)

…say that something happens to you.  Often these are unpleasant things:

I had my wallet stolen.

(we don’t usually use get in these situations – get implies that the speaker is happy for the action to take place)

…give an order in the imperative form:

Get your hair cut!

(it is more usual to use get than have in the imperative)

Form:

have/get + object + past participle

I get my house painted once a year.