This brings us to the reason we have written this book and spent several years in creating the designs and drawing the practical plans from which you can build:

With the great surge of "do-it-yourself" projects in recent years, hundreds of thousands of people have been fired to build things, finding, as they work, those solid satisfactions which are in manual work. This is quite aside from the substantial saving in money which would be spent for labor, which is another satisfaction. Under the skins of most of us lurks a pioneer who either "did-it-himself" or found that it didn't get done at all. In our work today-be it factory work, office work, or the humdrum tasks of the housewife-we are finding fewer of the satisfactions which workers used to encounter before this age of specialization, which has made most of us small cogs in the great machine. There is good therapy in working with one's hands. Particular satisfaction will be found in the act of creation when the object created proves useful and beautiful in one's home.

. . . gimmicks or good taste?
But there are all-too-apparent dangers in this great spate of do-it-yourself projects. So many of the designs offered to the home craftsman today for the adornment of his home and garden are in such poor taste that, although his property may be "embellished," it is questionable whether or not it has been "improved." As one disgusted designer recently put it, "These things are so 'gimmicked-up' that we might as well be back in the Victorian Gingerbread Age-might better be, in fact, because those designs were better than most of the junk today and they fitted in with the houses better, too." We couldn't agree more heartily, and that is the main reason we have worked out these designs and plans and written the text for this book. We feel that if people are going to put the time and the effort (not to mention the cost of materials ) into projects of this sort, they are entitled to better designs from which to build.