How Taking up DIY and Crafts Can Change Your Life #CP ... The Yorkshire Dad Blog ...

These days, it’s easy to find any number of products that you might want or need, for any purpose, in just a few minutes spent surfing the web, or else venturing down to your local retail outlets.

Likewise, if you need any work done around the home, or want to have a complex item of furniture assembled, you can always find an expert to contact who will be able to handle that for you, almost irrespective of where you live.

While there are some real benefits to this, it’s also a massive departure from the way things have been for all of human history up until very recently – where people were, by necessity, much more DIY-savvy, and likely to be engaged with crafts, including things like the creation of their own furniture.

Increasingly, there is an enthusiastic movement of people who are keen on reclaiming the DIY skills, and on brushing up on their craftsmanship.

Here are just a few ways that take up DIY and crafts can change your life significantly.

It can actively give you an excuse to enjoy your home and garden more

One of the great benefits of getting actively involved in DIY and crafts, is that it can give you an excellent excuse to enjoy your home and garden in a more engaged and interesting way.

Constructing a gazebo or other garden feature, for example, is the kind of hobby that is likely to really keep you busy for a prolonged period of time.

Among other things, you might want to select coloured cladding that weatherproofs the structure in question while being strongly visually appealing, in addition to thinking about other ornamental features, ways of making the structure practical and useful for social gatherings in a range of different seasons, and more.

All too often, we end up engaging with our homes and gardens in a more or less passive way. In other words, we are “there,” but we mostly spend our time lounging around, surfing the web, watching TV, and so on.

There’s something really great about working on DIY and craft projects around the home, that can help you to experience a renewed sense of gratitude for your home, in and of itself.

I actually built a sandpit in our back garden and it was of the most rewarding projects i have worked on, you can see how i did it here: DIY Sandpit

It can satisfy the deep inner need to be creative

It’s probably fair to say that, at least on some level, everyone has a deep inner need to be creative and to express themselves in the world.

Art is one way of expressing your inner creativity, but DIY and more practical crafts can certainly fill the same “niche” as well.

In fact, books such as “Shop Class As Soulcraft” go as far as to suggest that creating and fixing things with your hands can be a spiritually uplifting experience that can connect you with a deeper sense of meaning in life.

As already mentioned earlier in this article, few of us really have to create things for ourselves these days, as there’s a virtually endless array of consumer goods and utilities out there that can be purchased as required.

All the same, there is something about making things yourself that just addresses some ancient inner yearning in many of us.

It makes you more self-reliant and useful around the home, and in other contexts

What if something breaks around the home that you know you could hypothetically fix on your own if you just had a little bit more hands-on experience and insight, and the right tools?

Normally this wouldn’t be such a problem, since there will always be professionals available to repair things in short order. But if anything happens to delay the repair process, or to make it more costly than you can handle at the moment, it will be a real benefit to have some of your own DIY skills at hand.

Taking up DIY and crafts simply makes you more self-reliant, which is not only useful, but is also a great feeling and of itself. What’s more, it makes you more useful in other contexts, and better able to help other people, too.

Being able to help your friends and family in a pinch is always good.

It helps you to engage more mindfully with your belongings and the world around you

The same dynamic that can make you fall into a purely “automatic” state of mind with regards to your own home, can also apply to the world, more generally.

If you’re not actively engaging with things on a regular basis – in the kind of way that things like DIY and crafts naturally makes you – you may find that you feel like a spectator in life more than a participant.

Taking up these kinds of active pursuits can “flip the script” here in a very beneficial way.