Do-it-yourself nation

Given her druthers, Margery Stegman would have preferred to spend a recent sunny Saturday shooting hoops with her teenage son. Here is how she spent the day instead: clearing out dead grass, branches, leaves and twigs from her large, heavily wooded backyard in Lexington, Mass., then hauling it to a mulch pile.

It was a job for which Stegman and her husband used to hire landscapers. The couple routinely paid $450 to $600 for fall cleanup and $300 to $450 for spring cleanup. Not anymore. The economic downturn has hit her graphic design company hard, and taken an even deeper toll on her husband's management consulting business. At the moment, paying for yard work makes no sense to them.

"It costs a fortune," said Stegman. "So I was like, OK, that's it. I'm doing most of it myself."

That refrain is heard more and more among homeowners. Amid a protracted recession, the middle class is rediscovering the pleasures and pains of manual labor. Whether it is a faucet that needs fixing, a lawn that needs tending, cracked bathroom tiles that have to be replaced, kitchen cabinets in need of refinishing, or a house crying out for a new coat of paint, "do it yourself" is the new mantra.

Hardware stores report a deluge of cost-conscious customers looking for do-it-yourself products and tools. "You name it, they're doing it," said Paul St. Jean, assistant manager at Aubuchon Hardware in Maynard. "Home repairs, small electrical jobs, replacing their own toilet. What they can do, they're doing it, if it's not too hard."

The data suggest that a growing cadre of do-it-yourselfers now consider "too expensive" more daunting than "too hard." An ongoing survey of 13,000 homeowners by the Florida-based Home Improvement Research Institute found that while there was a minuscule decline in the number of home-improvement projects in February and March compared with the same period last year, there was a steep 17 percent drop in the number of projects that involved contractors.

In a further indication that many homeowners are paying for materials but supplying much of the labor themselves, the survey found that homeowners were planning to spend an average of $603 per project this February and March, down from an average of $685 last year. "People are attempting the more simple things themselves in an effort to save money," said Richard Johnston, senior research analyst at the institute.

This quest for self-reliance, of course, involves a learning curve. If you don't know which end of a hammer to hold, you probably have no business wielding a glue gun. Mindful of that fact, novice do-it-yourselfers are seeking advice along with their hardware store purchases.