The Strange Allure of Watching Other People Tear Up Their Homes

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.”

Squarely in this last category do I fall: I have never tried to renovate my home, because I do not own a home, and — by the way prices and mortgage rates are trending — maybe won’t ever. For me and most of my unfortunate millennial brethren, homeownership is something of a fantastical notion, not the plausible ambition it once was, before today’s intractable housing crisis. But even so, dwelling in my New York City rental apartment, roughly the size of Chun’s two-car garage, I can happily spend hours, days, watching home influencers knocking down walls in their cavernous basements or pouring concrete for outdoor pools. Why is this?