Woodhouse turned her home into one big drawing board, with a full-blown workshop at the heart of it all.
Carving Her Niche: Inside Jen Woodhouse’s DIY Dream Home
Kentucky entrepreneur Jen Woodhouse made a living as a singer-songwriter before becoming a mom. The change in pace didn’t stop her from being creative; she just ended up sketching a new life path. “For my first Mother’s Day, I got a miter saw,” she says. Woodhouse got to work creating a shoe bench and was surprised by how easy it was—and how much she enjoyed it. “If you can follow a recipe, you can build a table.” It’s that kind of thinking that inspired her to try bigger projects and launch a YouTube channel devoted to easy builds and fixes.
Inside the workshop
Woodhouse’s very first project when she, her husband, Adam, and kids, Evie and Liam, moved into their Louisville-area Colonial in 2017, was building a workshop adjacent to their new home. “It needed to be more than 9 feet tall, so I could fit a full sheet of plywood and have a ton of electrical to run a table saw and shop vac at once and not flip a breaker,” she says. “It has more power than our house!” In the workshop, she builds the new additions for her home on her own, with the camera rolling.
Stair runner solution
The Woodhouse family always found their staircase to be awkward. It was two-thirds carpeted and one-third hardwood floors. And it looked dated—an orange honey-tone oak with beige carpet and balusters from the ’90s.
But it was their Rhodesian ridgeback dog who really sealed the deal on getting them to do something about it. At 100 pounds, Watson is a big guy who in his old age started having mobility issues, and going up and down stairs was a challenge made even more complicated by the slippery hardwood. Woodhouse took the problem into her own hands and overhauled the stairwell, replacing the wood with white oak, adding new railings, newels and balusters, and adding a runner to provide better footing for Watson and her family.
The three-day project started with heavy sandpapering to get down to raw wood, followed by an oil refinish and paint job, and rug pad and runner installation. She added brass stair rods as a finishing touch, which she says was “purely decorative and a bit pricey.”
Check out Woodhouse’s step-by-step guide to installing a stair runner.
Basement home theater
As a huge movie lover, Woodhouse saw instant potential in the basement. She combined her love of history and cinema to refashion a space into an Art -Deco–style home theater. To create the effect, she installed sconces and heightened the drama with gold trim.
“My saw didn’t cut that steep of an angle so I had to make a jig,” she says.
Of course, the main attraction here is the drop ceiling. Previously, the ceiling was covered with everyday white tiles. Woodhouse knew a gilded look would recall the glory days of theater, so she scoured samples from Home Depot and chose a thin plastic, but incredibly ornate-looking, option. “The material is so thin I actually cut it with scissors,” she says.
The basement fireplace had a typical beam mantel, which she jazzed up by installing a custom build around it, highlighted by beveled edges. She kept the original wall paint and amplified some walls with a different strength of paint for a subtle tone-on-tone look.
Home office with DIY built-in filing cabinets
While the office came fully loaded with built-in bookshelves and didn’t need much TLC, Woodhouse was sold on the room for a different reason: the south- and east-facing windows with hand cranks. She added French doors a transom above them.
To give the shelving an even more functional twist, she built cabinets underneath. “I want filing cabinets that didn’t look like filing cabinets,” she said, giving the entire piece a paint job using Roycroft Bottle Green from Sherwin-Williams. “I pulled the color from the wallpaper, which I decided on after asking for dozens of samples online. The floral print looks Asian-inspired, and considering I’m Filipino, it felt perfect.”
Today, Woodhouse continues to share her love of DIY not only on her website (jenwoodhouse.com) but on her online marketplace, Spruc’d Market, where vetted builders can upload and sell their project plans.
