A study by the US Home Improvement Giant Lowes has shown that more people enjoy menial DIY tasks than you may have imagined. A website named MediaPost recently published the figures which make it seem like garden design and choosing a new fitted bathroom are less like chores and more like an enjoyable experience in their own right.

According to Lowes a huge 82 percent of the people in their surveys intend to tackle a garden-based project within the next year. When it came to interior design it was a similar story with 82 percent of the people in the study saying that they would carry out some painting within their home whilst 65 percent of the subjects said that they would paint external walls.

Additional internal DIY work was also something subjects mentioned in the Lowe study and of those questioned 56 percent claimed to want to install their own new flooring and 55 percent said they were ‘remodeling’ or adding a new bathroom to their home.

Doing DIY for Fun

What is most interesting about the study is that when asked what the main motivation was for doing the DIY, 32 percent of respondents said it was for ‘pleasure.’ This compares with a similar 35 percent which claimed it was to spend less money.

One theory on why people find DIY so pleasurable is related to how we as humans become stressed. According to some researchers we become most stressed when we feel that a lot of factors in our jobs, lives (or DIY project) are out of our control.

The less responsibility we have, the more stressed we become and the more control (or responsibility) we have the happier and less stressed we are. Obviously, DIY allows people to feel entirely in control of their actions and if they do a job well, this is evidenced in their living space so it not only helps some of us to relax but also offers us a lasting reminder of our efforts and our success.

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