Will the 2021 Home Improvement Boom Last into 2022?

It’s well known that do-it-yourself home improvement took off during the pandemic, when lockdowns forced many people to stay home and many of them adapted their spaces for work and school. But, as Marketplace reports, what’s surprising is how it’s kept up.

“A lot of us thought that, you know, ‘Gosh, by the time everyone gets vaccines and everyone’s done their DIY projects in 2020, it’s going to come to a crashing halt.’ And we haven’t seen that,” said Grant Farnsworth, who tracks the home improvement industry with the Farnsworth Group, a market research firm.

One reason, he said, may be inflation. “We are seeing price as one of those areas, causing homeowners to do it themselves,” he said. “Those that have not hired, a large chunk of them said either, ‘I couldn’t get ahold of the contractor, or I can do it cheaper myself.’”

The question is how long the DIY boom will last. Before the pandemic, Americans were growing less interested in doing it ourselves. Abbe Will follows home improvement trends at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. In 1999, she said, more than 41% of improvement projects were DIY; by 2019, that had fallen to 37%. When it comes to home improvement spending, “the share for DIY projects had been declining steadily before the pandemic,” she said, from about 24% in 2005 to just 17% in 2019.

There are several reasons for the decline, Will said. One is that homeowners, overall, are older and may be less inclined to swing a sledgehammer or climb a ladder. Rising prices have kept a lot of younger people from becoming homeowners. Our houses are older too and need bigger repairs that require professionals, like new roofs or foundation work. “I think all of those factors will continue to pull on the DIY share of home improvement spending and potentially revert back to these longer-term trends,” Will said.

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