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Although owners had always maintained their homes, the home improvement industry did not become recognized until the early 1950s, when it began to draw the attention of retailers, advertisers, consumer magazines, and the general public. Contractors and tradesmen had a large share of the market, but home owners themselves were doing a substantial and growing amount of the work. The do-it-yourself culture became popular, triggering an aggressive response from manufacturers and retailers. Before the first serious attempt to measure home improvement came in 1954, estimates had relied on building permit data combined with the impressions of building suppliers and contractors. Revival of home improvement was driven by an increase in household size and rising incomes. Two decades after 1945, “customer-finished houses” sprung up everywhere.

This chapter describes the origins of the fan magazine, which goes back to the popular general magazines promoting consumer culture and social issues that began publication in the 1880s and 1890s. These new publications, from which the first fan magazines borrowed their graphics and their style, included Munsey’s (founded in 1886 by Frank Munsey), McClure’s (founded in 1893 by S. S. McClure), and Cosmopolitan (founded in 1886 and taken over by William Randolph Hearst in 1905), followed in the early years of the twentieth century by the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies’ Home Journal.

The home improvement industry involves many different players, from lenders to manufacturers and retailers. Then there are the media such as consumer magazines, television shows, and web sites and blogs that instruct, entertain, and address our needs for an improved home. Do-it-yourself emerged in 1952 as a distinctive market and became a recognized fad by 1954. The rise of the home improvement market took decades, and involved a wide range of cultural and economic forces. This book argues that the home improvement industry emerged at a time of rising affluence and growing consumer debt, together with the emergence of home ownership as the dream of the “American” (not to mention the Canadian and the Australian) middle class. It offers a closely woven historical narrative of the industry and discusses how lumber dealers severed some of their established ties with the lumber trade, the general crisis in the building industry that emerged in the late 1920s, the postwar owner-building boom, and the emergence of the home improvement market in the 1950s.

By 1949, there had been a boom in owner-building across the United States, Canada, and Australia. Owners accounted for a third of all new houses and a quarter of all dwellings of any kind, which were often being constructed outside city limits. Homesteading was taking place everywhere, in clustered developments and scattered locations. Despite the scarcity of building materials, the Canadian and U.S. governments helped to revive the building industry, the latter through a new Veterans Emergency Housing Program. Once they realized the magnitude of the amateur building boom, consumer magazines began to cater to owner-builders by offering assistance in the form of plans and tips. Newspapers, publishers, and plan companies did the same. Together, they convinced consumers that house construction was not as complicated as it sounded, that “anyone can build a house.” The idea caught on among amateur builders frustrated by the postwar housing shortage.