Tarrant County resident Stephanie Trantham is right at home with The Broadmoor House. Back in 2019, while living in an airplane hangar, she hopped onto Instagram to chronicle her own custom home build. Today, she continues to share everything from development insights to decor on her Instagram, @The_Broadmoor_House. With more than 340,000 followers and a love for everything home-related, Stephanie is ready to make you feel like you’re at home too.
OUR HOUSE WAS BUILT… pretty quickly. It only took five to six months to build. We got in right before all the supply chain and labor issues. Now, in our neighborhood, they are telling people it’s taking 18 months to build just because things have changed so much.
THERE’S A BIG COMMUNITY ON… Instagram for home building. I was following some people on there, and they were like, ‘You should start a page so we can see the progress on your house.’ So I started it but didn’t tell anybody — not my mom, not my husband.
IT WAS GREAT TO… document [the building process] on Instagram because I was connecting with others who were doing the same thing. No one in your life wants to hear about your house build as much as you want to talk about it. There’s all kinds of hurdles, problems, issues that you have, making decisions — it’s really nice to have a group of people for you to [communicate with].
YOU ARE MOST VULNERABLE WHEN… you get on Instagram and share pictures, thoughts and ideas. It’s a lot easier to share those ideas with people you don’t personally know. But after getting so many followers, people were starting to see my account and see me. It was super fun and exciting and very unexpected.
THE AMOUNT OF WORK THAT I DID… back then was pretty manageable. I could work in the morning, get all of my [LikeToKnow.It] posts done. Things were a little bit easier as Instagram was all about the photos. So I could do, in one afternoon, a whole bunch of photos of my house and have pictures for a couple of weeks.
NOW MY WORKLOAD IS… so much more. I have other people who are helping me at this point. I have a lot more content that goes out each day between LTK and Amazon. Now Instagram has changed quite a bit, and it’s not really a photo platform anymore — it’s a video platform. [It] probably takes as much time to make one video for one day as it did [to make] two weeks of content before.
I HAVE DIFFERENT… aspects to my account. I’m not just a DIY account or a deals girl. I do love deals, I do love DIY, [but we also] have a lot of experience with building and what we put in our house. So I get a few different questions in those categories all the time.
A GIRL MESSAGED ME THE… other day and said, ‘I wish I found your account before I hired an interior designer.’ Because she said she felt she could have done it way less expensively, and she would have liked it a lot more. So that’s really, really cool for me to hear.
I’VE ALWAYS NEEDED A… creative outlet through art, and so this job — God blessed me with this job at a point in my life when I really needed it. It encompasses all of the different avenues I love. I love photography, so I get to [take photos] of our house and my kids. It encompasses graphic design because we have a website, [and] you have to design when you’re creating the collages and different mood boards. I love helping [and] connecting with people, so there is a big aspect in that. There are so many different aspects of this job that are so perfect for me that after two years… the burnout is not here.
IT JUST KIND OF… fell in my lap and I realized it was helping some people who really don’t know anything about interior design or just need a sounding board to say, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’
IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT… the trends are — you should do what you love. If you find that lamp you love, figure out a way to make it work. Tweak a couple of things, maybe change the decorations around it, but it’s really important to really love what’s in your house.