I woke up one morning in April 2023, putting on a ridiculously unflattering outfit of black jogging bottoms, mustard jumper and socks with my trusty Birkenstocks, no shower, no make up, and set to demolishing the leaky shower in our shower room, recording a video whilst doing so, that would go on to be seen by over 30 million people. Had I have known more people would see this video than the whole population of Australia, I would have, let’s be honest, put a little more thought into my appearance!

But I was not thinking of cute DIY overalls or that so many (mostly men!) would end up analysing my choice of footwear at the time. Instead I was frustrated that 2 out of 3 of the showers in our home were out of use leaving us with the one downstairs that was mouldy, falling apart and had smelly carpet surrounding it. With plans to set the downstairs bathroom right (which would mean our only working shower would also be out of action for months,) I thought we could get away with a cheap and easy fix for the leaky shower in the shower room upstairs as I knew the problem was with the gaps appearing in the grout, causing water to leak through to the room below.

I was just keen to get demolishing. We needed to find a solution to our shower problem and without having money to throw at a completely new one, we needed to see if we could do this DIY style. Oh how wrong we were!

Of course, if you have been here a while you will have seen the video I am talking about, and know what I found when removing the tiles in our shower. For anyone new, this is what happened: Whilst taking the tiles off the first shower, I found another whole shower behind it, tiles, shower head and all. When I took the ‘secret shower’ down, I then found another layer of tile with a mirror on it! So altogether we had a mirror and tile, hiding behind a shower and tile, hiding behind another shower and tile. The project escalated fast at this point, because it became obvious that we would have to gut the whole thing. Whoever installed our shower, not only just built it on top of the old one, but they didn’t tank it or use appropriate backer board for the tiles and everything had gotten rotten or mouldy.

After posting this discovery on Instagram, it soon went viral and I was receiving thousands of comments in a way I had never done before. I shared the video on TikTok too, despite me being very new over there (I think I had about 8 videos and 200 followers at the time,) and it went wild, racking up over 20 million views in the first few weeks.

In the ten years I’ve been on social media, I have never had anything go remotely viral so the whole experience was very new. I remember waking in the night, checking my phone and seeing that whilst I had been asleep a few hours, another 2 million people had seen the video. My brain couldn’t even compute the numbers. I would check comments, replying to questions and good-heartedly correcting commenters assuming it was a ‘landlord special’, a ‘council house special’ or typical ‘American architecture’. My following on TikTok rocketed from 200 followers to over 50,000 and the story ended up in news sites across the world. From the BBC Homepage, to the Dutch Telegraf, New York Post (who’s headline reads ‘the start of a horror film’), The Sun, The Daily Mirror and Newsweek not to mention news sites in Poland, Thailand, South Africa and beyond. Everyone kept referring to me as the TikTok renovator despite me barely even knowing how to use the app!

Shower room renovation The Otto House — The bathroom before. It’s a small dark windowless shower room which mostly gets used by the kids and as a back-up bathroom when we have guests.

shower room the otto house — As you can see the tiling was a mess in here, not to mention all the different levels which have since mostly been removed to gain more space.

I’m ashamed to say the adrenaline of it all meant I struggled to sleep for days. Having your phone alive with activity next to you all night is not conducive to a calming night of sleep. Of course, I shouldn’t have checked in with it so much, but watching the numbers spiral and the comments multiply, I’m embarrassed to admit - it became a tad addictive. This thing had gone far beyond my control and I wanted to keep on top of comments, all the emails coming in from journalists, not to mention IRL friends messaging me saying ‘Did you know you’re on the BBC Homepage?!.’

I did a radio interview with BBC Solent, countless interviews with other journalists, and whilst it was all fun and a new experience, it was also very overwhelming. From trying to ensure newspapers I don’t like didn’t get permission to run the story, to whether I should be asking for a fee from certain publications I did like who were running the story, or when other papers posted it without my permission (looking at you… The Sun), who do I contact to ask them to remove it, and am I entitled to any compensation!? It is a world completely new to me and I guess the journos know that too, as they are keen to make money off your story without necessarily sharing the spoils. Whether this is normal or whether I played ‘the game’ badly due to having so much coming in, I didn’t have time to keep on top of it. But despite over 30 million views and the story being published across 30+ national and international new sites, I earned a grand total of £101 from the exposure.

DIY shower room renovation the otto house — Demolition for days… weeks even!

Of course, it has benefitted me in other ways though. As I create content for my job, it is no bad thing to have more eyes on my work and I was very fortunate to get most of the items as pr products for the new bathroom which massively helped towards the cost of the work ahead. We love the finished result and now all the layers have been taken out, the bathroom is bigger, allowing us to have a wonderfully large shower which has proven to be a complete game changer for the kids daily bath/shower routine.

Overall it still feels wild that so many people were interested in our bathroom. My husband kept saying, ‘it’s really not that interesting!’ but I guess when you’re footing the bill for all the repairs it doesn’t feel quite so humorous!! I try not to take it too personally that after years and years of creating content, the one piece that goes viral is me revealing someone else’s ‘work’, rather than anything I have actually created myself. Alas, social media is a fickle bean and I know full well no good will come from dwelling too long on that. In fact, when I reposted the video on Instagram right before sharing the reveal, it too went viral again, this time reaching 6.4 million views (and still rising). It received all the same comments, jokes and (in a few cases) trolling, but I’m happy to say this time it did not keep me up at night and I barely took much notice of it, despite being happy for the brands involved with the refit that it would be laying the foundations for a well performing ‘reveal’ - which it did.

I am so grateful to all my community who champion everything I do and stick around despite me not finding any more skeletons in the closet (just yet anyway?!) so I am really looking forward to being more creative this year and having more time for smaller more accessible hacks and ideas rather than the big two bathroom projects that swamped our 2023. Who knows what will be popular this year and where this house and the content created from it will go, but one thing is for sure, I will carry on DIYing in my Birkenstocks no matter what all the men of the internet have to say!