These days Chun is without doubt one of the hottest house influencers on this planet, and she or he makes a number of instances her former wage by displaying off her self-taught constructing and adorning. Firstly, “I had no concept folks made cash from this,” Chun, recognized to her million Instagram followers as @ourhome.changing into, instructed me just lately once I visited her in the home that made her well-known: a two-story, colonial-style new-build in suburban Bergen County, New Jersey.
Since then, practically each inch of the home has been torn up by Chun’s personal palms. There’s that molding within the lobby (“I needed to relearn math for this”), the laundry-room countertop she lower and varnished (“My first time utilizing a noticed”), the drywall she faux-lime-washed (“Actual lime-washing can rub off, which isn’t kid-friendly”), the stone fire she thickly outlined with a method known as “overgrouting” (“@chrislovesjulia, who’s form of my gold customary, taught me that”).
To look at just a few of Chun’s 800 posts and Reels on Instagram is to be whipped onto an M.C. Escher escalator of chance. Many, just like the before-and-after transformation of the lobby wall, are panoramic delights meant to pique curiosity on an app’s algorithmic homepage. Different movies are frenzied and brightly lit how-tos, usually lower into uneven, hyperspeed time lapses. Chun reveals up in T-shirts and leggings, laughing and holding paint rollers. In just some quick-cut pictures, she bores a filtered-water dispenser into the mud room, or slaps LED mild strips onto the underside of a bit of wooden to show it right into a luxe show console, or “hacks” IKEA wardrobes right into a customized walk-in closet.
On every undertaking, Chun is each foreperson and laborer, script-flipping a gender stereotype of bodily housekeeping. (Her husband may pop right into a shot to regular a scaffolding ladder or maintain a curtain rod, however the very best factor he can do is to “take the youngsters out for a drive and go away me alone in the home,” Chun instructed me.) Her movies are stuffed with upbeat, can-do angle, the phrases I’m so proud of how this turned out! consistently invoked, like a witch’s spell. One notably well-performing video she made in 2022, through which she describes herself as a information for “high-impact, one-day transformations” and “high-end seems on a price range,” ballooned her follower depend from 35,000 to 400,000 in simply days, Chun instructed me. The feedback on this submit could be sorted into 4 sorts: There’s “You might be such a boss,” “Your home is gorgeous” and “Please come to my house,” after which, “I’m over right here struggling to arrange my pantry.”
Squarely on this final class do I fall: I’ve by no means tried to renovate my house, as a result of I don’t personal a house, and — by the best way costs and mortgage charges are trending — possibly received’t ever. For me and most of my unlucky millennial brethren, homeownership is one thing of a fantastical notion, not the believable ambition it as soon as was, earlier than immediately’s intractable housing disaster. Besides, dwelling in my New York Metropolis rental condo, roughly the dimensions of Chun’s two-car storage, I can fortunately spend hours, days, watching house influencers pulling down partitions of their cavernous basements or pouring concrete for outside swimming pools. Why is that this?
