The housemates who became DIY stars on Instagram

Times

09-07-2025

Ola Soyemi and Cullen Farleigh bought a tumbledown house together just as the country went into Covid lockdown. However, unlike many 25-year-olds stepping on to the property ladder, Soyemi and Farleigh were not in a relationship.
'It made sense for me and Ola to buy because we had the same job and same income,' Farleigh says. 'We were working together every day as part of our old job [in creative advertising, which they also studied together at the University of Lincoln], we were a duo, and we have been since university. We worked out that we'd actually spent more time together than most married couples. So the trust was there.'
Soyemi and Farleigh had been working together for five years after graduating before deciding to take the plunge. After viewing about ten houses, they put in an offer on a three-bedroom property in east London for £452,000 and moved in in March 2020. They each put in half the £45,000 deposit, and the £1,290-a-month mortgage payments are split equally.
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Initially they intended to buy the house with the legal status of joint tenants, when you own the whole property together, with equal rights, but later switched to tenants-in-common, which is more usual among friends because each owner has a distinct share of the property.
So began their homeowning story together — and their career as online DIY stars. Now the pair have resigned from their advertising jobs and have embarked on this new line of work. And, remarkably, neither of them had any experience of being handy around the house — apart from the time Farleigh fixed Soyemi's doorframe after breaking it at university.
The video material for the friends' future stardom came out of a home emergency. As soon as they moved in they began to uncover a glut of problems with their dream home and, partly out of exasperation, they began to post videos online documenting them.
It all started with the wallpaper. 'As we stripped it off we realised the walls behind it were completely messed up,' Farleigh says.
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'The bricks were falling down, there was water, there were holes in the wall. At one point we were taking the bricks out of the wall and then you could just see the outside.
'Then we realised the floors were rotten. We took all the doors off, then the dust went everywhere and it was basically just a shell of a house for many months.'
Soyemi adds that when they started videoing each other doing repairs, they didn't initially think of putting it online. 'When we got the house I was just recording lots of videos because I just had a feeling that it would be cool to document the process. And then eventually that turned into us posting it online,' he says.
Within weeks their Instagram page, @bricks.and.disorder, took off and viewers embraced the organised chaos the friends found themselves in, and watched them trying to rescue the situation. It turns out their travails were perfectly timed: as well as being marooned in their homes during lockdown, the viewing public were also becoming captivated by the concept of buying and doing up homes during the pandemic 'race for space'.
The Instagram page has now amassed 496,000 followers, and they have almost a million on TikTok and 297,000 on YouTube.
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It took them five months and 100,000 followers to start earning money from their Instagram content, but it was only enough to supplement their regular income until two years ago, when they were able to resign from their jobs and become full-time video bloggers, or vloggers.
The pair, who are both 30, employ a video editor, along with Farleigh's wife, Beth, who also lives with them, to help. They never expected that buying a house would lead to such a dramatic career transformation. 'We knew we had the skills, [but] once we set that plan in motion, it's cool to see that it's materialised,' Soyemi says.
In one of their favourite videos, their first on YouTube, they build their own designer sofa from scratch. Starting with sketching the design and planning the materials, viewers can watch their comedic thought and design process as they buy wood, foam and fabric.
They explain every step and highlight their lack of expertise, while offering advice, the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and consistent laugh-out-loud moments. The 17-minute video has had 2.7 million views and 167,000 likes.
'That was our first YouTube video and it just blew up,' Farleigh says. 'The video performed really well but it was also one of our most creative projects.'
Half a decade after moving in, they have reached a fork in the road — and this is where the friends' decision to buy a house together gets tricky. While Soyemi is keen to move out and live on his own, Farleigh and his wife are keen to stay in the house. This is a change to their original plan, that they would live there for five years before moving out.
'I think our biggest stress right now is we didn't really do enough planning,' Farleigh admits. 'So now we're going back and forward on that a little bit and just trying to work out what's the best way to do it.
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'Do we rent it, how do we rent it, do we sell it? That's the conversation we're having now.'
This dilemma is one likely to be shared by many friends who buy together: how to untangle your finances if and when you decide to go your separate ways. That's still something that the pair are trying to figure out.
1. See how much you can do yourselfIf we can't afford to get work in we'll get a quote from someone and ask them to break down the job. When they break down the job, we can then decide if maybe we only want them to do part of it and we'll do the other bit.
2. Have an emergency fundIt depends on the state of the house. If you bought a new-build, you only need maybe three months of mortgage payments. But if you're doing a lot of renovations, you'll need a lot more.
3. Put your financial arrangements down in writingIf you're buying with a friend, make sure you have a contract in place and also a business plan for the investment.
4. Invest in safety equipmentOnly in more recent years did we get the masks, the glasses and the gloves — we still don't have steel toe-cap boots, but we really should.
5. Check for asbestosIf you are getting an old house, more than about 80 years old, then you should always check for this.