I’m trying hard to be sad about the fact that the national love affair with DIY is over. Sales of power drills, MDF shelving and other unspeakably dull items are down £600 million as people instead embrace the spirit of GSI (getting someone in).

Technically, I should care about this. Doing it yourself constitutes the very backbone of thrift, and I’m grimly aware of the pitfalls of getting a man in. I once asked a chirpy Sarf Landan handyman to build a wall and gate outside my flat. He said he needed £600 cash upfront for the materials, drove off to the “suppliers” with my wad in his back pocket and I never saw him again. By the way, if you’re reading this – Hi, Simon! You odious, thieving pig.

But still I cannot mourn DIY’s passing. Let me count the reasons why. First, it is about the unsexiest thing that a male can do. Show me a man wandering the aisles of B&Q looking to mend a toilet flange and I’ll show you a limp libido. Second, DIY kills joie de vivre. People who say, “No, we’re not having a holiday this year. Geoff’s laminating the hall instead,” might as well be in a coma. Third, it can be disastrous. Thousands of pounds have been wiped off the value of people’s homes by botched jobs, hence the death of Changing Rooms and the rise of DIY SOS. Fourth, an estimated 70 DIY enthusiasts are killed each year, though they have willingly flung themselves from their stepladders to avoid the tedium of grouting.

One theory is that the influx of Polish tradesmen has made GSI so cheap that you’d have to be some sort of nutter to spend your weekends grappling with corner cabinets when you can pay someone £30 to do it while you browse Popbitch.

I like to think that there’s more to it than that. I believe we are finally learning to get a life, and can see that ever more insular existences in which we withdraw further behind our Leylandii hedges to discuss our Magnet kitchens border on purgatory. The creeping domination of the flatpack in which even the simplest household item must arrive in a thin oblong box with a free spanner has nurtured a revolution against doing anything ourselves.

For years we have been lurching into DIY overkill: bleaching our own teeth, testing our own stools, even diagnosing our own HIV with handy £11 homepacks (they sometimes get the results wrong but, hey, it’s not life or death is it?) and I think we’ve had enough. Now there is a new type of DIY and it involves nothing more arduous than spilling the beans on your workman. Websites such as ratedtradesmen.com puts you in touch with three local tradesmen. All you have to do is write up your comments on his work ready for the next user.

Here’s my tip: if a dodgy Londoner called Simon offers his services, give him a swift kick in the Niagra Falls.

bargainhunter@thetimes.co.uk

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