Page 35 - HW April 2021

global eyes
European home renovators
did a lot but some wish they hadn’t!
WITH B&Q (www.diy.com) posting
annual sales growth of 13%, its research reveals why – no less than 86% of British householders spent at least one month out of the last (12 or 15 hours each week) improving their homes.
Adapting homes to be more suitable to a new way of living and using DIY as a welcome distraction to maintain wellbeing were key motivations behind the surge in home renovations in 2020.
Garden improvement projects were the top priority for homeowners with a quarter (27%) saying they did so to spend time with friends and family as gardens became critical spaces for socialising.
B&Q also saw sales of the storage category take off (+24%) enabling multi- use spaces within homes to be adapted and clutter-free, to make way for room dividers and home office furniture.
B&Q says the main areas of renovation in order of priority in 2020 were:
1. Garden.
2. Living room.
3. Kitchen. 4. Bedroom. 5. Bathroom.
Top DIY jobs that have been completed over the past 12 months:
1. Garden maintenance e.g. weeding and
planting
2. Painted internal walls.
3. Filled in holes.
4. Put up curtains/blinds.
5. Painted skirting boards.
6. Built flat pack furniture.
7. Exterior decorating (painting fence).
8. Put up shelving.
9. Fixed a leaky tap/pipes.
What price a poor DIY experience? – Putting a dampener on all this UK home improvement activity are a raft of poor DIY experiences, according to a survey conducted for UK savings, retirement and insurance business Aviva (www. aviva.com).
The company puts it that almost half of UK householders – some seven million UK households – who renovated homes during the pandemic now regret their decisions.
On top of which, fully one fifth of
those with regrets say their pandemic project is still unfinished and one in five encountered a significant unforeseen problem during their work!
That’s a lot of regrets seeing that almost 60% of UK residents have made physical or aesthetic changes to their homes, since the Covid pandemic began.
The most common disappointments relate to painting and wallpapering rooms (regretted by 24%); home maintenance efforts like fixing loose floorboards or wobbly tiles (14%) and upcycling projects (13%).
Some people had even bigger reasons to be disappointed: 9% of this group regretted a new bathroom, while 5% were unhappy with a new extension.
These frustrations come with a significant price tag too: on average £676 for each regretted project.
This adds up to a massive £4.9 billion spent on unsatisfactory efforts.
A quarter said their project took longer than expected, 19% said the quality of work wasn’t good enough, while a similar number (18%) encountered significant problems during their home makeovers, such as drilling through a pipe!
The same again (18%) had started a task which still isn’t completed, while 14% just didn’t like the finished look.
And while more than half say they plan to put right their problem projects (at an average cost of £716!) the remaining 43% have decided to go with the flow.
Still, more than half of these regretful
UK home improvers say their lockdown experiences have put them off making further changes to their homes.
Which would be good for DIY professionals but a shame for the home improvement industry, at the same time an added incentive to push their Do It For Me (DIFM) offers...
DIFM takes a dive – Having said this, another recent study, applicable to Europeans rather than just Brits, has it that over the last couple of years, or until 2019 to be precise, there was a slow but gradual shift towards more DIFM in the total amount of home improvement jobs done in Europe.
Over four years, say Dutch analysts USP Marketing (www.usp-mc.nl), the share of DIFM jobs increased from 33.5% to 37.5%, less able, older persons and non DIY-savvy youngsters both being the key drivers behind this trend.
However, come 2019, this shift towards more DIFM stopped and in fact decreased.
The reason? “First and foremost, it is all about the costs. In this case, labour costs,” says USP, thanks to shortages of professionals.
All of which simply added fuel to the already hot trend towards DIY.
The question of where to now for DIFM in Europe now revolves around the availability and therefore cost of labour, whether the service originates at a DIY retailer or a white van guy.
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APRIL 2021 | NZHJ 33