The latest accessory for women is decidedly less fashionista and more Bob Vila: tool belts.
More and more women are purchasing houses on their own and sharpening their do-it-yourself skills in the name of home improvement. Hardware retailers and manufacturers are more than willing to sell them the goods to do so. And women are buying them.
The number of home purchases by women rose 49 percent from 606,000 in 1989 to 903,000 two years ago, according to the National Association of Realtors. And as the number of woman-headed households grows, so does the number of women wielding a hammer, paintbrush or other tool.
Eight out of 10 women, in fact, said they plan to tackle at least one home-related project in the next year, be it painting a drab room, replacing a door or installing a light fixture, according to a recent poll conducted for Home Depot by Roper ASW.
The numbers reflect a new type of homeowner, like Alexandra Vuksich, who can’t think of a better way to spend a weekend than taking a sledgehammer to a rotten fence.
“The more I got estimates, the more I thought to myself, `You can do this,”‘ said the San Francisco native, who recently knocked down her picket fence (which long ago fell victim to the Bay Area fog); ripped up her lawn; cracked, pieced and lifted her concrete walkways; installed an electrically powered fountain; and uprooted and replanted nearly every plant in the place.
“I’m single and don’t have a guy around to do stuff. Simple as that,” she says, laughing, when asked what got her hooked on home improvement. That and a few uncles who encouraged her to figure out how things work when she was a child.
“I remember having fun taking a bunch of nails and hammering them into a piece of wood. I used to beg to saw things. And eventually I began building my own go-carts.”
Julie Sussman, in contrast, wasn’t born a so-called handy ma’am or a jill of all trades. She grew up in a more typical American household, where chores were divided by gender.
“I knew how to clean dishes, but I didn’t know how to fix the sink,” she says.
She married, but her husband was rarely around to fix things, so she and her friend, Stephanie Glakas-Tenet, learned their way around the toolbox and taught themselves how to tackle a laundry list of nagging home repairs, including drippy faucets, temperamental locks and blown fuses.
Eventually, they shared their lessons with fellow and would-be female fixer-uppers and wrote a 245-page manual called “Dare to Repair: A Do-It-Herself Guide to Fixing [Almost] Anything in the Home” (HarperResource, $14.95).
The book has more than 300 illustrations, step-by-step explanations on how to tackle 75 household jobs, and pep talks for first-timers. The authors take a lighthearted approach, assuming that the reader doesn’t know a gas water heater from an electric water heater, much less the name of each tool.
Sheila Davidson-Rollin taught herself how to fix up homes as a way to spend more time with her two boys during their summer vacations. That was two decades ago. Now, chatting with the longtime single mom, it’s easy to see why more cordless drills are sold for Mother’s Day than Father’s Day, according to the Home Improvement Research Institute.
“What can I say? I’m a little strange, maybe. Power tools can be very seductive,” says Davidson-Rollin, a clinical social worker in Richmond, Calif., who is now restoring a two-story Edwardian with her fiance. (The five-bedroom house was originally built in Berkeley in 1905 and suffered damage to its plumbing, walls and roof when it was moved to El Cerrito, Calif., in 1941.)
Other women who share Davidson-Rollin’s taste for tools, doing without high-priced carpenters, contractors, electricians and plumbers, say that it’s high time toolmakers and retailers started paying attention to their demographic.
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“Women are saying: `Look, enough with these uncomfortable tools. Give us tools that we can and want to use.’ And these tool manufacturers are finally getting it,” says Sussman, who used Oxo brand tools when writing the book. (The authors will soon be coming out with their own line of tools, as well as a follow-up paperback on repairing your own car.)
Women now make half of the purchases in Lowe’s and Home Depot stores, two of the nation’s home-improvement giants.
Lowe’s recently surveyed single women and found that 9 out of 10 feel comfortable using power tools, and 77 percent own at least one. Home Depot, meantime, discovered in its study that 57 percent of 534 women surveyed (ages 25 to 49) have bought some sort of tool in the past 12 months, including hammers, handsaws, electric drills, sanders and mowers.
“Women have always played a major role in decisions concerning the home, whether it be choosing the overall decorating scheme or simply selecting a new appliance. What you’re seeing now is that women are not only choosing the color of the bedroom walls, they’re doing the painting and installing the crown molding too,” says Jason Feldman, director of style, innovation and design for Home Depot.
Such is the case for Christine Powis, who asked for, and got, a deluxe Dremel tool kit for Christmas. She can repair almost anything, including toilets and broken-down trailers, in large part, she admits, because she’s too cheap and impatient to ask (much less wait) for the men in her life to do so. Still, there was a time when she was intimidated by hardware stores and their largely male staffs.
“I was too shy to ask for something.” she says. “I wasn’t sure how to phrase what I was looking for. I didn’t know the proper lingo, and there didn’t seem to be very many people willing to help me.”
How times change.
Home Depot this year began offering how-to classes catering to its female customers. More than 43,000 women nationwide took part in its first Do-It-Herself Workshops, getting the basics on power tools, building patios and installing outdoor lighting. The free clinic was so successful, the company now offers the classes quarterly. Briggs & Stratton, which produces gasoline-powered engines for outdoor equipment, likewise started its own women-only education program, Yard Smarts for Women, a brochure and Web site aimed at helping women learn the ins and outs of lawn care.
While the big-box chains work to get more women into their stores, several scrappy startups are going directly to the source.
Mary Martin bought her first fixer-upper in Costa Rica. It was there, out of necessity, that she learned to handle power tools. She now buys and fixes up houses in Central California and teaches other women the basics of power tools via her mobile beginners workshop service, Mz. Fix-itz.
Among the fastest-growing small companies capitalizing on the female touch is Tomboy Tools, which uses a similar time-proven marketing tactic aimed at the female demographic: in-home parties a la Tupperware. The Denver company sells hammers, screwdrivers, pruners, garden gloves and other products that are slimmer, lighter and ergonomically designed for a woman’s smaller hands and body frame. The company’s motto: “No Pink Tools.”
“I was the classic female homeowner complaining about how things were falling down around me,” says Sue Wilson, chief executive of Tomboy Tools. “I didn’t have the cash to hire out all of the jobs that needed to be done, so I started learning and doing some of them myself.”
But bulky, hand-me-down tools and lack of know-how made the process slow at first. So she brainstormed with a group of friends and designed her own gadgets. Wilson and company now have a bustling Web site packed with do-it-yourself advice, customer chat rooms and 100 trainers across the country hosting how-to get-togethers and touting Tomboy Tools.
Barbara Kavovit likewise was fed up with tools that were too big and cumbersome for her size and frame. So she created a sleek, compact box neatly packed with lightweight, female-friendly gadgets with non-slip grips. Kavovit first sold her tool kit at decidedly un-hardware stores–Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and J.C. Penney–but is now working to get some shelf space alongside traditional tools in big-box stores.
“I use that tool kit every single day–whether it’s to raise my son’s bicycle seat, fix the basketball hoop or tighten my cabinets,” Kavovit, a single mother, former Wall Street trader and founder of a construction company, said of her popular 24-piece toolbox, one of about 80 Barbara K products. “I don’t want to call a handyman, and I don’t have to. No woman should have to.”
Resources
– Home Depot’s Do-It-Herself Workshops, www.homedepotclinics.com.
– “Dare to Repair: A Do-It-Herself Guide to Fixing [Almost] Anything in the Home,” www.daretorepair.com.
– Tomboy Tools, www.tomboytools.com or 866-260-1893.
– Barbara K 30-piece Do-It-Yourself Toolkit, www.barbarak.com.
– Briggs & Stratton’s “Yard Smarts for Women,” visit www.yardsmarts.com or call 414-259-5333.