Amanda Vernaci looked at her basement and saw ice time.
The content creator, who shares home DIY projects and upgrades with 1.6 million Instagram followers, spent three months redesigning the space for her young sons. She turned it into an in-home hockey rink.
Vernaci started her Instagram page in January 2019 while her husband was in veterinary school and the couple was living in a rental home. She said she felt “so stuck” knowing it was not her “forever home.”
“I just felt like it didn’t feel like my own,” she says. “And I came to this realization of we’re not promised four years from now, so why would I spend these next four years not loving the place I live? And I just felt like this stir in my heart of there has to be other people that feel this that aren’t in their forever careers or places, or maybe they’re not married yet or whatever. And that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t love where they live.”
She said the goal of her page was to show people they did not need “a big luxury mansion or tons of money” to love their home.
“I wanted to show cool budget-friendly, easy DIY things that were achievable,” she says. “Fast-forward, I think people just liked the relatability of it. I truly was just on a very small budget, trying to make things work in this rental house.”
While pregnant with her first child, Vernaci and her husband bought their first house and started hiring people for projects. Then the pandemic hit.
“And so it was kind of like, if I want any of this stuff done before [the] new baby comes, I’m going to have to do it myself,” Vernaci recalls.
At eight months pregnant, she bought her first table saw at Home Depot and taught herself as she went.
“I’d never picked up a tool before and was just teaching myself as I went, showing mistakes,” she says.
She said that approach connected with people on Instagram.
“I think people liked that, and it showed a very relatable, achievable way that if this girl, literally eight months pregnant who’s never touched a tool, can do this, maybe I can too. And so then my love for tools and just, I don’t know, it just snowballed and was like, ‘Well, wait, if I can do that, then I can totally build this.’ ”
Now a mother of two, Vernaci said most of her projects are for her sons.
“We’re very into sports, and they are just so much fun, and they have such imaginations. And so it’s fun to be able to be creative, tied with this DIY aspect where it’s like really anything is possible,” she says. “And I want to teach them that and to dream really big, and that I don’t know, I just get questions a lot of like, ‘Well, what about resale of your house and whatever?’ And it’s like, I’m looking in right now, and we’re just having so much fun,” she continues.
When the family moved into their second home, a fixer-upper, they knew they wanted a finished basement. Vernaci said she did not originally plan to build a rink there.
“At the time we bought this house, I would’ve never thought I’m going to put a hockey rink down here ever,” she adds.
The idea grew over time. Her boys played downstairs in winter with a mini stick and nets on the carpet, then asked for a penalty box. Vernaci bought a large rug designed to look like a hockey rink and boards that clicked together.
“We have season tickets to the Red Wings, so they’re immersed in it and they’re just wanting to be like these players,” she says.
Eventually, she started thinking bigger.
“This is so real to them. We sing the national anthem, and they go to the locker room, and they do all these things. I’m like, ‘What if I could give them a real arena experience down here?’ And we have the room for it,” she recalls.
Vernaci said there were no formal build plans for the project.
“People are like, ‘Where are the build plans? I want to build this.’ And I’m like, ‘I literally just survived to this point. I have no idea how to tell you how to do this.’ ”
She first planned to build the rink boards herself, but decided to buy a board kit. She later bought glass and learned to attach it to the boards the way glass railing is attached to a deck.
“That’s how I’ve always done projects is it looks really big when you look at it, but if you just go to the very first step, it’s like, ‘Okay, just assemble these boards,’ ” she explains.
Followers often ask about cost. Vernaci said the synthetic ice cost about $2,700, but added that it was not necessary and that she could have painted the concrete, installed carpet or used a rug instead. She said the glass was the most expensive part at about $5,200 because she chose a thicker polycarbonate.
She said the final price depended on choices including the synthetic ice, the thickness of the glass and the rink’s size, about 7.6 metres by 4.6 metres.
“I’m always tracking things as I’m going. I always tell people, I’m like, let me finish it and then I’ll circle back. I’ll always do a cost breakdown for people, or here’s all the materials,” she says. “I’ll always have resources and that kind of stuff for people because I think that’s important.”
She estimated the full project cost about $17,000, though she said she could have cut costs in some places.
“I want it to last for us. And so it made sense for me to go on the higher end for the specific type of glass that I bought because I was like, as my boys get older, I want it to be basically bulletproof.”
“It costs what it costs; basically is what I came down to with this,” she says.
Vernaci told PEOPLE that part of why she loves these projects is showing her sons “what hard work looks like and what you get when you work hard.”
“We want to instill those kinds of things in them, which I think is cool,” she tells PEOPLE.
Her sons appear to have taken that message in.
“Even just last week, he brought home this pair of sunglasses that broke of this girl’s at school,” she tells PEOPLE. “And he was like, ‘I told her you’d fix them.’”
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