Tiktok your way through renovations
Social media app quickly becomes a hit with the Do It Yourself crowd
When it comes to home renovations, Tiktok is becoming HGTV'S tech-savvy younger sister. Not only is the video-sharing social media platform bursting with DIY projects and satisfying before-and-afters, but it's doing it with bite-sized uploads — perfect for binging.
Search the hashtag #homerenovations, for example, and you'll find videos with 1.4 billion views, according to the home insurance experts at money.co.uk. Those experts further broke down which home renovation projects are the most popular on the platform.
Kitchen-related ones using the hashtag #kitchenrenovation have 90.5 million views, and bathroom renos using the hashtag #bathroomrenovation come in second with 67.6 million. Do-overs in the garden (21.9 million), laundry room (21.3 million) and basement (15.1 million) round out the Top 5.
Of the videos performing especially well within Tiktok's three-minute time limit, money. co.uk singled out a before-and-after clip of an Ikea kitchen makeover, from @perkinsonparkway. It garnered more than one million views within 24 hours of posting. A three-part video series featuring Chloe Grayling (@lovechloejane) as she renovated the bathroom in her 1880s cottage racked up over 3.5 million views.
House Beautiful editors also have their favourite DIY accounts, such as @alittlevictorianreno, which focuses on a Victorian home renovation in England, and @renovationliving, with its inspiring before-and-after clips.
Why are videos like these so popular? Some viewers are looking for ideas they can incorporate in their own homes, and others could be indulging in what psychologist and philosopher George Herbert Mead called symbolic self-completion.
“If I have all these things on my mental checklist of things to do around the house, I can get the satisfaction of crossing things off my checklist from watching videos,” Evan Malone, professor of Art and Film Philosophy at the University of Houston, explained to Insider.
It could also be a much-needed form of escapism, as many parts of the world are still coping with the effects of the COVID -19 pandemic.
“The picture that is emerging from media studies and psych literature is that this is self-soothing — the world is getting more chaotic, there is this desire to see something ordered and familiar, or more ordered,” Malone said.
User Breanne Malonis (@bretomolonis) echoes the sentiment. She's been documenting a home renovation on her account, and finds that the most popular clips tend to be timelapses that chronicle her building furniture.
“The process of building a home and watching all of it come together from nothing can be very satisfying ... every time we posted a before-and-after (video) so many people seemed to be amazed by the process,” she told Insider.