It started with a buffet.
Amanda Becker found the piece of furniture in 2022 as she scrolled through Facebook Marketplace, looking for things she could use in her new apartment without breaking the bank. Water stains bloomed across the dark wood, but the owner was giving it away for free, and Becker could tell the piece “still had a lot of life in it,” she said. Plus, she thought it would be a fun project.
Becker, then in her mid-20s, picked it up, quickly realizing she didn’t have any tools and didn’t actually know what saving the buffet might entail. So, Becker toted the piece to her childhood home in North Carolina and showed it to her dad, Ken. He was a passionate handyman in his free time, which meant he spent most of Becker’s childhood completing do-it-yourself upgrades and small renovations of their home.
“He has all the tools,” Becker said. “He has all the knowledge.”
Working in the family garage, her father showed Becker how to revitalize the piece, sanding down its tired finish, repairing damaged wood and giving the piece a fresh coat of matte black paint sealed in wood wax. Becker filmed the restoration process for her own use, thinking she’d make a kind of “diary” of “what [Dad] taught me, how to use these tools, how to make this transformation happen.”
“Let me remember how I do this so I can do it again,” she said.
Although it was supposed to be “a little notebook for myself,” she said, Becker decided to post the video on the internet, just to “see what happens.” She did the same thing for her next flip and the next one, gathering views and follows as she posted. The content drew eyes: Some followers were charmed by its wholesome father-daughter dynamic (a bubbly daughter working alongside, and learning very practical skills from, her father) while others were there to learn alongside Becker as she narrated the steps.
In the roughly three years since Becker started posting, she’s amassed nearly 156,000 followers on Instagram and almost 800,000 on TikTok under her @builditlikebecker handle, selling some of the furniture she flips and branching out into more extensive home renovation projects.
“I think people really caught on to, ‘oh, it’s a dad-and-daughter-duo, and they just having fun together and building these projects together and hanging out,’” Becker speculated. “I think they could see this bond growing and forming.”
Side projects take the main stage
Becker didn’t foresee herself going down a path of furniture flipping and content creation. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate, now 28, thought she would be in the fitness industry for the rest of her life, putting her studies in sports science to use by opening up a gym studio.
She taught classes for about a decade before taking on a partnership role with her longtime employer. “The way you expand, essentially that you make money, is having your own studio,” she explained. So, the move made sense for her career, at least until the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in 2020, upending the fitness industry and leaving Becker with a biting need to supplement her income. She moved back in with her parents — her mom, Marge, is an accountant —and that’s when the furniture flipping started as a side project.
Becker said that handiness and DIY work became a lifelong side project for her father, too. The longtime North Carolina resident is a pharmacist by trade, but he loves projects of all sorts, meaning he has a workshop outfitted to the hilt with tools and a reputation: “A lot of my friends and family know that he’s really good with his hands and that he can fix anything,” Becker said.
Her father is the person Becker’s friends call when a water heater broke (“they’re going to him before Google,” she said) or a leak sprang, but he’s “really humble,” Becker explained.
It even took her some time to appreciate fully what he could do.
When you’re young, she considered, “you’re kind of self-centered and not appreciative of what your parents do for you or their skillsets.” But as Becker matured, especially as her dad helped her upgrade the space for her fitness business, she “started to really appreciate his skillset and how he saves us money.”
“He has all these skills he could teach me that I never realized [and] I should have been asking these questions a lot earlier,” Becker said. “But I’m glad I eventually woke up.”
The so-called awakening — and the resulting furniture flipping — helped Becker and her father grow through challenging periods. While Becker dealt with pandemic-wrought financial struggles, he faced health struggles. He’d been sick during Becker’s childhood, “so we actually didn’t know if he was going to be around,” she said, and still managed some symptoms and pain. The collaboration gave each of them a fresh kind of “purpose,” Becker noted.
“These two things brought us together,” she said. “We lifted each other up.”
From flipping furniture to flipping a house
Now in their third year of public furniture flipping, Becker and her dad are branching out. Furniture flipping is interesting, but the problems and steps they encounter — and walk their viewers through — get repetitive.
“It’s really the same process over and over again,” Becker said.
Her parents purchased a 1940s-era house in Ardmore, North Carolina, about 20 minutes from the family’s home in Winston-Salem. Becker is newly engaged and living inside the run-down home, flipping entire rooms with her father until the property is ready to sell. The project offers a completely new set of problems ranging from spatial to design, “so it’s kind of more expansive in terms of me being creative,” Becker underscored.
So far, the pair has worked room by room, repainting, repairing, and modernizing as they go. The kitchen transformation was their heaviest undertaking to date, Becker noted. It saw them transform a galley space into an open kitchen-dining area that pulls sunlight deeper into the house.
They’re not rushing through the project, Becker said. “It’s just me and my dad, and he’s very methodical, which is amazing, but that means he’s also slow in terms of we’re not just going to get in there and out.” During the demo process, this means the pair isn’t just in a room knocking things out. Her father “is taking every nail out,” Becker detailed, noting that he doesn’t like to waste material. “He’s stacking up the wood. He’s organizing it.”
In the meantime, Becker and her dad have continued flipping furniture. Her mother sources most of the pieces Becker flips, scouring Facebook Marketplace and local estate sales for good options, so it’s a team effort. And after all is said and done with a flip itself, it can take Becker anywhere between eight and 12 hours to cut and edit a video for her socials.
Despite all that work and all she’s learned over the past three years, Becker is, like her dad, humble.
“I’m just a girl trying to learn from her father and trying to figure it out along the way,” she said. “I’m just very grateful to be able to spend all this time with him and learn from who I think is a master.”
This story was corrected on June 16 to reflect that Ken Becker is a longtime North Carolina resident.