Paper short abstract:

With single-family suburban homes as case, this paper will discuss the role of DIY-work in the universe of homeowners. How can we understand DIY-work as a practice between chore and creativity? And how has it been connected to a global market of stuff for house and garden?

Paper long abstract:

For most homeowners the house equals freedom, but homeownership is also being given the responsibility of what anthropologist Daniel Miller has labelled "(...)the elephants of stuff. Huge lumbering beasts that are excessively hard to control" (Stuff, p. 81, 2010). By this he understands houses as a complex assemblage of materiality that is continuously formed by and is forming the homeowner in an ongoing process of relational materiality.

In this paper I look at DIY-work understood as home improvement where homeowners "(…) decorate, alter, build, maintain or repair any part of their house themselves, rather than paying a professional tradesperson to do the work for them. (Mackay & Perkins, 2017, p. 1). I zoom in on a specific plot in the suburb of Albertslund, where boilersmith Vagn Jensen in 1968 built his own house. The house was inhabited and looked after in 50 years before the last owner, Vagn's wife Annelise, died, and the house was cleaned out, sold and demolished. During several visits in this period, I found that the house was an exotic exhibition of vernacular creativity and what might be labelled anti-architecture.

With the Albertslund-house, and other visits to single-family homes in the same area, as cases, this paper discuss the role of DIY-work in the universe of homeowners. How can we understand and research DIY as practices and processes? How is the materiality of the home-universe connected to production and consumption? And finally, how can we understand DIY-work as culture heritage in a museum context?