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.
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.
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 something simple or easy; her first project was sanding and refinishing all of the home's original hardwood floors. "It was a chaotic mess," said Bruner, whose Instagram account has since amassed more than 600,000 followers.
My own journey had a more modest start. At the time, my approach to home improvement was largely limited to decorative disguises, and I was fairly convinced that, if done cleverly, I could achieve most anything with paint. The den, the largest room in the house, was a pig that no amount of lipstick could fix: a mess of poorly done broom-swirl plaster walls covered in fake wood paneling and carpet that had been glued directly to the concrete longer than I'd been alive. For the first six months, I dealt with the den by thumbtacking blankets over its doorless entryway and pretending it wasn't there. By winter, a draft rolling in from its two uninsulated exterior walls made ignoring the problem increasingly difficult.
On Christmas Eve that year, I grabbed a crowbar the previous owners had left behind and began gently prying at the baseboards and paneling. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this activity did not cause the house to collapse around me. I tapped at the plaster with the chisel end of the crowbar until cracks formed, finally working up the nerve to break through the wall. As the first chunk fell, I realized that my fear of the unknown had been the biggest hurdle. If I could take a room apart step by step and understand how it had been put together, I could learn to build it back up again, like anything else I had figured out from the ground up.
Thankfully, there are less invasive ways to begin. "If your end goal is to learn framing or woodworking, you can start with building a simple garden box or picture frame," Pearl Reist said. "Small projects can allow you to learn skills and make mistakes on lower-stakes things." From a list of tools she recommends for beginners, Pearl Reist's top choice is a multi-bit ratcheting screwdriver. "It replaces Allen wrenches and can help fix glasses and other small things around the house," she said. (I learned about the tool after nearly stripping the nuts on the back of my washing machine with a pair of pliers.)
Learning these skills doesn't necessarily require owning a home, either. Beth Kindig volunteers with Habitat for Humanity's Women Build, an Indiana-based program that teaches practical construction skills. "It's a very hands-on experience. We're building a house, usually for a single mom," she said. "You can help somebody else while also thinking, 'Hey, someday this could be me in my house.'"
For Kindig, helping single women secure housing is also a reminder of the not-too-distant past. Her late mother, Josephine, knew how to frame a wall and install a toilet, but was only able to get an apartment on her own after the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act made it illegal to deny women credit because of their sex or marital status. Kindig learned many of those same skills from Josephine, but increasingly it's the type of knowledge being passed between people who have never met.
Knowing how to do something is only one part of doing it alone. Often the challenge that follows is finding the tools that give you the reach, leverage or workaround to make the job manageable on your own.
DIY home renovator Stephanie Huynh's pick for jobs that require height is the Flip-N-Lite, an ultra-lightweight ladder that opens with one hand. "You will find yourself needing to get into a higher spot more frequently than you probably care for," Huynh said. "Getting an easy-to-deploy ladder, or better yet, a ladder structured like a step stool that you can get out easily, will save you so much frustration and energy."
Beverly Griffith has relied on her own 8ft Cosco ladder for nearly a decade. An avid collector of vintage furniture and decor, Griffith lives in a bright pink house that became something of a local attraction the summer the Barbie movie was released, with passersby frequently stopping to take photos. Inside, Griffith designs the rooms around a steady rotation of estate sale finds, taking on projects ranging from installing glue-up ceiling tiles to hanging new wall coverings to complement them.
Griffith is prone to rearranging a room on a whim, which makes being able to move furniture without another set of hands particularly important. "I certainly wish I had bought furniture sliders earlier, before I scratched up some areas of my hardwood floors shuffling furniture around," Griffith said. She recommends nail-in sliders, which she says are less likely to pull loose, over the adhesive iterations. I opted for a more permanent solution to the same problem by putting caster wheels on some of my heavier furniture after a crew of movers left a large antique buffet blocking the door to my laundry room.
If lifting heavy furniture enough to get the sliders underneath is a challenge in itself, Bruner suggests keeping a pair of construction jacks handy.
"They can help you easily lift up big furniture and support heavy doors while you take off the hinges," she said. "Even if you just need to switch out a rug under your couch, a pair of lifts can make the job so much easier."
Huynh's own projects now range from bathroom demolition to deck-building, a considerable evolution from someone who entered homeownership without what she describes as even a foundational knowledge of power tools. She recommends starting with a drill and impact-driver combo set, with Makita's being her top choice: "Their drills tend to be lighter and better balanced than their competitors and have been much easier on my smaller-set hands." For budget-conscious beginners looking to start with just one, Bruner prioritizes an impact driver with a smaller battery, which puts less strain on your hand than a standard drill.
Don't assume that a complicated project means that the tools have to be, too. When I met Meghan Kindsvater seven years ago, home projects were one of the things we initially bonded over. At the time, Kindsvater was reaching the end of a five-year run living in a Sprinter van she had converted, having taught herself the basics of carpentry and electrical along the way. After settling into her current home in 2020, she drew up plans for a 900-sq-ft accessory building on the property and went on to build almost all of it herself. For work of that scale, some of the tools she considers indispensable are surprisingly basic. "With [a speed square] and a 3ft level, you can build a house," Kindsvater said.
Once you start building a tool collection, Kindsvater recommends staying within a single brand's ecosystem. Her power tools and lawn equipment run on the same Ryobi 18-volt batteries, allowing her to swap batteries among them rather than accumulating a different charger and battery system for each one.
Not every tool needs to earn a permanent place in your toolkit. "I try to rent tools and equipment that I know is one-time use, such as a jackhammer or an auger," Huynh said. "Take into consideration what you can physically see yourself using all the time or frequently. Those are the items I would invest in." You can also check for a tool library in your area, where tools can be borrowed much like books from a traditional library.
I learned the value of being selective in my purchases the hard way. Faced with a basic tiling project in my kitchen, a cursory search for "what do I use to cut tile" led me to buying a wet saw that same day. After a single afternoon of chipping tiles and feeling trepidation about the water-electricity-blade combination a wet saw relies on to do its job, I discovered that a $25 score-and-snap cutter was all I actually needed. The wet saw found a new home with a friend, and I came away with a rule of my own: if the cost per project isn't lower than the rental fee, I probably don't need to own it.
"Truthfully, most things that I hire out I feel like I could do myself, but it is usually a game of time v money," Kindsvater said. After spending a full day on yardwork and hardly making a dent in removing overgrown brush, she hired someone to finish the job. When it came to a broken toilet piece, however, Kindsvater did it herself: it cost just $14 for the replacement part and took less than an hour of her time. Calling a plumber, she said, would have cost nearly $200.
When London-based violinist Natalia Senior-Brown received two professional quotes for buying and hanging curtains that were well outside her budget, friends suggested that she piece together the setup herself using Ikea components. Senior-Brown figured out the products and quantities she needed, then enlisted her dad and his drill to help with the installation. "It's exactly how I pictured, for almost 10% of the original quotes I got!" she said.
Taking care of a home on your own can feel isolating. For me, forgoing time with friends to make house supply runs after work became my default, a fact that struck me the day I left a hardware store and the cashier called after me: "OK, I'll see you tomorrow."
For Natasha Herron, a Nashville-based tailor restoring a Victorian home, one antidote was finding other people embarking on similar journeys. Herron created a social media account for her house and tapped into an online community of enthusiastic and knowledgeable renovators. When Herron was trying to install an antique stained-glass window, she ran into a gap around the frame that she didn't know how to finish.
"I know it sounds silly, but I just could not figure it out," Herron said. She decided to take her problem to social media, and soon heard from another woman restoring an old house who recognized what was missing: a piece of exterior trim called brickmold. She sent Herron photos and videos of her own window showing where the trim belonged and how it covered the gap. With that, Herron had the answer she needed to finish the installation.
Years into the restoration, Herron does still have a long way to go. "My staircase has been in shambles for two years," she said. "It's not how it looks on social media with the fast before-and-after reels." But the same online community of renovators and content creators that can make progress look deceptively fast have also encouraged Herron to keep going. "It's easy to get overwhelmed, but honestly watching what other women are accomplishing online and speaking to them about it is really inspiring," she said.
Learning how to take care of your home is a balancing act – one fix will inevitably beget another. Part of becoming more capable is learning to triage what needs your immediate attention, figuring out what you need to accomplish that and deciding when to ask for help. For myself, and many of the women I spoke to, the real value in learning how to do the work is the freedom of choice that comes with it.
For Kindig, that choice can also carry a small act of defiance against the societal norms that limited generations of women before her. "It's almost like you're flipping off the man," she said. "It's saying: I can do it. I am a competent, capable woman, and I'm going to figure this out." It's an attitude Kindig hopes carries forward, but the real measure of progress may prove to be a generation of women for whom doing the work doesn't register as defiance at all.
When I stopped by Kindsvater's house to take photos for this story, it had been almost two years since I had last seen her. In that time, her daughter, Sparrow, had become a fully mobile toddler. Sparrow has her own small toolkit now and is no stranger to getting her hands dirty. When the power went out this past winter, Kindsvater got the generator going while Sparrow stood at her side holding the flashlight. Kindsvater gives her daughter real jobs around the house – a bolt to finish tightening, a clamp to grab from the toolbox – treating Sparrow's participation as valuable, but never remarkable. "I want it to be normal for her, and for her to feel confident," Kindsvater said. "She's gonna grow up knowing it all."
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