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Americans are great “do-it-yourselfer (DIYer).  This starts from regular household maintenance and repair to large  project such as built your own boat or house. The annual $ spending by the population on DIY products  and material exceed the professional construction industry spending. When my wife and I first started our family, DIY was a necessity due to budgetary constraints. But over the years we learned to enjoy the tasks  and they became sort of a hobby. Here let me list the joy and advantage of DIY:

1.      In the US where labor cost is high, DIY saves considerable amount of money

2.      Once you become experienced, you do a better job most of the time than the professionals  since the job is your own. You don’t mind lavish attention to details.

3.      Household maintenance is often “prevention”. As the saying goes, “one stich in time saves nine”. It is  difficult if not impossible to hire professionals to do small preventive maintenance work.

4.      You can do repairs and maintenance immediately anywhere anytime rather than  waiting for help. This is a tremendous advantage and convenience in the US.

5.      You get a sense of accomplishment by DIY.

6.      You learn some useful knowledge

In our household, my wife is the carpenter, decorator, and dress maker. She is an expert at the last item  and saved the family large sum of money over the years. In the US, the latest high fashion clothes  often immediately turn into dress patterns for sale after their Paris and Rome showing. If you are good at sewing,  you can have high fashion that fits you and save thousands of dollars. On the other hand, I handle the less visible  and dirtier job such as electrical wiring and plumbing work. As a team we can tackle almost any household repair,  maintenance, and construction job including almost the entire inside of our small vacation cabin.  Over the years, we built up a large collection of tools and books for DIYers and derived enormous pleasure from using these tools to tackle jobs.

I’ll be happy to hear to what extent are DIY projects common among the mainland Chinese urban  population. Enlighten me.