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Chipped Paint, Paper Curtains and Worn-out Floors
Derry mom keeps home life real on TikTok
BY CASEY McDERMOTT
Stephanie Murphy has had a long relationship with social media. She joined Facebook during her freshman year of college in 2005 — when the fledgling website was still limited to students. In 2017, she started using Facebook to sell clothes. In 2020, she opened a storefront for her business, Blue Violet Boutique, in her hometown of Derry — and that same year, she started turning to TikTok as another promotional tool.
“I grew my account in those two years from 0 to 42,000 followers,” she said. “And people loved seeing, like, behind the scenes stuff, as well as what it was like being a small-business owner and how to order products.”
Last year, Murphy decided to take a break from her business — and almost left TikTok. Instead, she decided to turn the camera on her own life. But instead of serving up a carefully curated portrait of her suburban life, the kind of envy-inducing highlight reel that was already plentiful across social media, she decided to offer a less glamorous view inside her home: unorganized closets, unkempt junk drawers and all. And that’s when things really started taking off.
“For a while, when you scrolled on TikTok, you would see these gorgeous manicured houses, um, and everything was perfect and in place. And it made normal people question their life,” she says. “Like, is this how everyone else lives except me? Am I the only one that can’t keep up with their house? Am I the only one who is having trouble making ends meet and can’t even afford my own mortgage — never mind a million-dollar house?”
One such video was picked up by “Good Morning America,” and some racked up more than a million views. Since then, Murphy has continued to grow her presence on TikTok to more than 140,000 followers.
“I am very open and honest about the fact that I’m just an average, everyday mom,” Murphy says. “There is nothing special about me. I am not an influencer that lives in a mansion. I show the behind-the-scenes of my house that is a disaster. It’s not always clean; it’s not always organized. But that’s how everyone lives.”
She’s also come to rely on TikTok as a steady side hustle, bringing in extra cash from the platform for popular videos or in exchange for promoting other products. She says she treats it like a serious job, and it’s allowed her family to pay down all of their debt, but she’s not banking on it as a primary source of income.
“Ever since I started making money on TikTok, I said it does not matter how much money I make as a content creator, I will never quit my full-time job, because social media in general is unreliable. It’s unpredictable,” she says.
As TikTok draws increased scrutiny from regulators over privacy and security concerns, Murphy says she knows the site’s future is far from certain. And if it were to go away, she acknowledges she’d be sad — but it wouldn’t dramatically disrupt her family’s lifestyle, or their ability to put food on the table. For now, she says, she’s just “riding the wave and enjoying it while it lasts.”
