Cherie Barber's project at Leichhardt Photo: ANDREW TURNER SCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY - The tiny enclave of hilltop properties making Teneriffe Brisbane’s most exclusive suburb
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Celebrity renovator Cherie Barber has personally renovated 101 properties and taught thousands of students how to do it too — but insists her success is all a big accident.
Rewind some 30 years and she was a Year 11 student who had to quit school to help her family after her parents divorced.
Like so many women of her generation, Cherie’s mum had been a homemaker and struggled to find employment after the separation, she recalls.
Celebrity renovator Cherie Barber Photo: Supplied
“Mum got a personal loan for a shop; she thought she’d become a business owner but it went horribly wrong,” she says.
“She tried to sell it, but couldn’t, so she pulled me out of school so she could go and find some other job and I needed to run the shop so she could pay back the personal loan.
“It wasn’t a very successful business… but I was operating a small retail shop all by myself from 17 to 19.”
Cherie Barber outside one of her heritage projects. Photo: Supplied
Cherie earned just $50 a week during those years and when the business was finally sold she found that she had outgrown the classroom.
A property ownership dream
She soon landed her first full-time job in customer service but her desire to own a house meant she started to work at nights as well.
“I was a general hand (at a leagues club). I did that for eight years. All through my 20s, I wasn’t going out to nightclubs, I was actually sensible, I think because I’d matured so much from that experience with my mum,” she says.
“I grew up with a very basic existence. My parents are classic Aussie battlers. My dad worked very hard — seven days a week — but they weren’t money smart.”
Her childhood experience meant she had a dream to own property, but it never crossed her mind to own more than one, or to become a renovator.
So it’s lucky she’s a hard-worker and tenacious, because her first property – bought at 21 with her boyfriend – was a disaster.
“We moved in and then (after) about a month living there, we were like: ‘This is really shit’. We’d bought on a eight-lane highway – four lanes one way and four lanes the other,” Cherie says.
“We’d be in bed at night and you couldn’t sleep. There were freight trucks going past and you’d think that one of them would come through your window at any moment.”
The couple had to get out, so they scrubbed that property from top to bottom and painted over its plum and green walls.
Cherie even went on a “rampage” outdoors.
“Because we didn’t have any money, all we did was rip up the grungy carpet that had been there for the past 30 years. We didn’t have enough money to polish the floor boards so we just left them as is,” she says.
“I went on a rampage with some garden clippers and a lawn mower and cleaned up the garden and made it look neat and tidy. We didn’t have enough money to update the kitchen or bathroom.”
After only six months of ownership, the couple walked away with a $40,000 profit, which they soon reinvested in another property in a slightly quieter street in the same suburb.
A renovation life takes shape
They lived there for seven years while undertaking cosmetic and structural renovations, but Cherie still had no grand renovation career plan.
“That’s why I call myself the accidental renovator because I never actually deliberately went to a seminar and went: ‘I’m going to be a renovator’. I fell into it by accident,” she says.
“I loved beautifying the spaces. I loved taking something that was quite ugly and making it look attractive.
“But the way that I renovated that second property was no good. I thought back then it was the bees knees… but I made a lot of mistakes and was winging it and trying to work things out for myself.”
It can’t have been that bad, because when they sold that property the now-separated couple walked away with about $250,000 in profit.
Still working full-time, now for L’Oreal, Cherie bought a house in Rozelle in 2000 that would wind up being the property that changed the course of her professional life.
Together with her partner at the time, she completed a renovation that took just eight weeks part-time and netted them a profit of $268,000.
“That was the catalyst. I earned three times my annual salary, working part-time doing something that I loved, versus something that I hated, so I just threw in my job and I never looked back,” she says.
“I was a slave to the pin-stripe jail. I never got any fresh air and I was making other people wealthy, not me.
“Every morning now, I jump out of bed and I put my work boots on and it feels like I’m doing a hobby that I just happen to make great money from.”