She may have rolled her eyes at her DIY dad when she was growing up, but Shabby.ie’s Aileen Hogan, picked up invaluable skills that Irish women want to improve on.
He was the original feminist, she says of her father, no longer with her but very much the man who showed her how to be independent.
Aileen Hogan is a veteran DIYer. She started out upcycling furniture and taught classes on it for a decade before deciding that she really wanted to learn more.
She grew up in a traditional household. Her father was the breadwinner and her mother the homemaker.
He was extremely handy, and ahead of the curve in that he insisted she watch how he did every single job in the house – even when, as a teenager, she just rolled her eyes at his efforts to engage her.
“If he were putting up a curtain rail, he would make me watch him do it and show me which tool to use and explain why.
"It was an invaluable education. He gave me my first tools, an awl, a spirit level and a hammer.”
Fast forward several decades, and Aileen has some 145,000 followers on Instagram, thanks mainly to her posting her own DIY journey.
“Making mistakes is the best way of learning,” she says.
And she’s used the house she bought in Terryglass, Co Tipperary, on the north-east shore of Lough Derg, as a laboratory.
Already living in the area, she and her husband bought their forever home in the village.
It had been a holiday home but was well laid out, and its bones were excellent. There were no immediate remedial works needed.
“It was a house, not a home,” she says.
She wanted to put her stamp on it, but was constrained by a lack of additional funds.
“It was too hard to get tradespeople into the house, and if you do, they’ll overcharge because the job was small and time-consuming.”
There was no money to replace the kitchen or doors.
So, she decided to paint them herself.
The kitchen cabinetry was solid maple, and she prepared it by sanding the door fronts and backs, then applied a good adhesive primer to ready the surfaces for colour.
She applied two coats and left the doors to cure for a couple of days before she started painting them.
Elsewhere, she repurposed a wardrobe as a pantry, inserting shelving into the main body of the unit and hanging a spice rack on the door and built a pergola cum garden room out the back.
On the walls, she used long handles to reach the vaulted ceilings in the living room and kitchen.
She uses microfibre rollers to achieve a sprayed-look finish. It also stops the paint from spitting back and ending up all over your face, she counsels.
She also covers her hands with painting gloves.
But she wanted to learn more, so she signed up for a course run by Tipperary Education and Training Board (ETB), the statutory provider of education for County Tipperary, delivering a large selection of high-quality education and training services.
She attended two nights a week for a 12-week period. There she learned how to identify the different types of walls, plasterboard and masonry, how to prepare them for painting, and how to repair damaged ones.
Tiling, she discovered that it is much simpler than it is portrayed to be.
“It is a logical step-by-step process. For walls, you start at a level middle point in the wall and work out to the sides from there.”
When wallpapering, she counsels you to paste the wall, not the paper, first, marking out the widths and factoring in an overlap of two centimetres.
She now shares all of this knowledge with her followers, including crucially, the mistakes she has made and still makes.
About three years ago, having received a load of messages asking if she would run some DIY courses, one-day classes teaching the basics and has run numerous courses.
These cover how to hang a picture; how to find studs in a plasterboard wall so you can ideally drill into the timber battens; how to prime and paint walls, how to prime and hang wallpaper and how to tile.
The courses also cover how to hold a drill, how to buy the right one for you, factoring in size and weight.
While she wears gloves when painting, she recommends never using gloves when working with powder tools – she only works with the battery-operated kind.
The classes sell out in less than 10 minutes.
Such has been the level of interest that she is currently completing an adult training and further education certificate at Maynooth University and is writing a course for the ETB.
“You need to be shown, to be able to practice,” she says.
She feels everyone should know how to clean their gutters, be able to replace rotten lats in a summer house, wallpaper and or paint a room, hang paintings and mirrors, put up a shelf and know which rawl plug to use.
Her knowledge is such that she is now a brand ambassador for Fleetwood, meaning the Irish paint company pays her for her knowledge. It is one of several collaborations she holds. Aviva Insurance and Aquabion are others.
“I use DIY as a platform to empower,” she says. “The medium of DIY improves confidence and raises self-esteem.”
This is reflected in her growing traction on socials. She has 145,000 followers and counting on Instagram.
And women’s confidence in tackling such jobs is growing.
The results of a recent study by paint company Fleetwood and research and data firm Opinions.ie, show that 72 per cent of adult women in Ireland have personally carried out DIY and or home improvement tasks in the last year.
Fleetwood’s weekend projects show simple DIY ideas that can be delivered in a weekend and include how-to videos, a list of tools needed and timelines
To find out more about Aileen’s DIY courses and hacks, visit Shabby.ie
