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Women who have tackled home repairs and renovations share hard-earned tips and tools that helped them patch drywall, refinish floors and build decks
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Prefer the Guardian on Google I entered homeownership the same way I started driving on the highway: learning on the fly and in a blind panic. I bought my house in my late 20s, with minimal home-maintenance knowledge, a flathead screwdriver, a rubber mallet that had lived through the Carter administration – and the realization that throughout my life, I had been spared from doing the dirty work at the cost of learning how it was done.
Many of my (male) friends growing up had nice power drills their fathers had given them, along with lessons on how to use them safely – an education that, for them, seemed to happen almost by default. As a kid, I prepared for my Girl Scouts troop’s big annual event, the cookie sale, while my brother’s Cub Scouts troop was learning to use coping saws and screwdrivers for the Pinewood derby. As recently as this year, I struck up a conversation with a welder and expressed my longtime interest in learning the skill, only to have him say it would probably be too difficult for me.
View image in fullscreen With help from Reddit, I learned how to reduce noise through a shared wall in this room by decoupling drywall from the studs using RSIC-1 Sound Isolation Clips, metal hat channels and finishing with Green Glue Noiseproofing Sealant. Photograph: Tracy Allison/The Guardian Before owning a home, I might have taken him at his word. There was a time when hanging drywall and cutting tile would have seemed well beyond the bounds of my own competence. But now, when people walk into my house, one of their first questions is often: “Who taught you how to do all this?” The answer is … a lot of people. I’ve just never met any of them. I cobbled my education together from online tutorials, Reddit threads and a lot of trial and error.
Emily Pearl Reist, a construction company owner and one half of the mother-daughter duo behind the podcast How to Handyma’am , is familiar with being underestimated. She recalls two occasions in the early years of running the company with her mother, Samantha Pearl, when customers directed their questions to a novice 18-year-old man on site and complimented him on work the women had done. “We do feel like we have to prove ourselves more in this profession,” she said.
Knowing how to patch drywall or replace a light fixture is one thing; learning how to assess and handle an unfamiliar repair or renovation is another. Below, women who have tackled the work themselves share what they learned along the way and the tools that helped them do it.
View image in fullscreen Renee Bruner: ‘My favorite project has been my kitchen renovation because it was so ambitious … I built all of the cabinets myself and gave it a red and purple color scheme with dramatic marble that is polarizing to white-kitchen-loving members of the internet.’ Photograph: Renee Bruner/The Guardian After Renee Bruner closed on her 1914 fixer-upper, her mother showed her how to use a drill. Everything after that was, in her words, “YouTube University”.
Bruner didn’t exactly start with…