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”).
To watch a few of Chun’s 800 posts and Reels on Instagram is to be whipped onto an M.C. Escher escalator of possibility. Many, like the before-and-after transformation of the foyer wall, are panoramic delights meant to pique curiosity on an app’s algorithmic homepage. Other videos are frenzied and brightly lit how-tos, typically cut into choppy, hyperspeed time lapses. Chun shows up in T-shirts and leggings, laughing and holding paint rollers. In just a few quick-cut shots, she bores a filtered-water dispenser into the mud room, or slaps LED light strips onto the underside of a chunk of wood to turn it into a luxe display console, or “hacks” IKEA wardrobes into a custom walk-in closet.
On each project, Chun is both foreperson and laborer, script-flipping a gender stereotype of physical housework. (Her husband might pop into a shot to steady a scaffolding ladder or hold a curtain rod, but the best thing he can do is to “take the kids out for a drive and leave me alone in the house,” Chun told me.) Her videos are full of upbeat, can-do attitude, the words I’m so happy with how this turned out! constantly invoked, like a witch’s spell. One particularly well-performing video she made in 2022, in which she describes herself as a guide for “high-impact, one-day transformations” and “high-end looks on a budget,” ballooned her follower count from 35,000 to 400,000 in just days, Chun told me. The comments on this post can be sorted into four types: There’s “You are such a boss,” “Your house is beautiful” and “Please come to my home,” and then, “I’m over here struggling to organize my pantry.”
