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You see her first from behind, just before she steps away toward a tall, plain wall. You get time for a blink — that’s it, maybe a tenth of a second — and then a sonic boom of indie pop drills into you, drums and rattling high-hats and a detonation of ahhhs, as a jump cut reveals that the double-height wall has been newly repainted and festooned with quadrilateral molding, angles prim enough to have been sliced by a chef’s knife.
Next to her handiwork, the woman stands beaming in a sundress. In the caption, a battle cry: “We can ALL tackle hard things!!!!!”
I have watched this video some 300 times. This is easily done, because it is only 20 seconds long. It’s snappy, merry, somehow animalistically pleasing. The video loops on its own. You could imagine it playing out endlessly, until the worms take over, until the end of time.
The woman is Lisa Chun, a 42-year-old mother of three. Chun is no interior designer, carpenter or architect: Five years ago, she worked in operations at Kipp, the charter-school network. But one day during the pandemic, marooned indoors and binge-scrolling social media, she had a sudden hankering to renovate the entryway of her house. Everyone and their mother seemed to be embarking on soup-to-nuts D.I.Y. projects at the time — and so, egged on by inspiration, stir-crazy and jonesing for a creative outlet, Chun reached for her nail gun. Just for kicks, she decided to film it on her iPhone.
Nowadays Chun is one of the most popular home influencers in the world, and she makes multiple times her former salary by showing off her self-taught building and decorating. At the start, “I had no idea people made money from this,” Chun, known to her million Instagram followers as @ourhome.becoming, told me recently when I visited her in the house that made her famous: a two-story, colonial-style new-build in suburban Bergen County, New Jersey.
Since then, nearly every inch of the house has been torn up by Chun’s own hands. There’s that molding in the foyer (“I had to relearn math for this”), the laundry-room countertop she cut and varnished (“My first time using a saw”), the drywall she faux-lime-washed (“Real lime-washing can rub off, which is not kid-friendly”), the stone fireplace she thickly outlined with a technique called “overgrouting” (“@chrislovesjulia, who’s kind of my gold standard, taught me that”).
