I didn't set out to become Drywall Shorty®.

I just wanted to be good at drywall.

I grew up around the trade. My dad was self-employed and had been finishing drywall for years, and I was on his jobsites from the time I was a kid — by ten, I was rolling walls with a 14-inch roller because he needed the help.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was learning a trade.

After one terrible semester of college, I came back to what I already knew and took my dad up on a full-time job with his crew. I started small: hand-taping tiny closets, learning stilts, watching the guys around me, screwing things up, trying again. And I loved it.

My dad was patient, hardworking, and a mentor. He did high-end homes and complicated custom work, and the expectation was simple:

Do it right.

That stuck with me.

In 2008 I started my own drywall business. Good years, hard years, a recession, huge multifamily jobs, high-end customs, long nights, weekends, kids — and more drywall than I could possibly count. Plenty of those nights ended at two in the morning because the job wasn't finished and there was no one else to do it.

That's the trade.

And somewhere along the way, I became a really good finisher. Not because I was trying to prove anything — I just cared about the work. I still do. If I know I can make something better, I have a hard time walking away from it.

Because I don't want to leave a job knowing I didn't do the best work I was capable of doing.

THEN CAME DRYWALL SHORTY.

A coworker suggested I start sharing my work on social media. My first thought was basically: “Who the hell wants to watch that? It's like watching paint dry.” But I figured I'd give it a shot. I'd been called Shorty forever, I'm short, and I do drywall — so the name was pretty obvious.

A few videos took off. Then a tool company reached out. Then more people started watching. And suddenly I had a decision to make: I could show people how fast I was, or I could show them why I was doing what I was doing. I chose the second one.

Because after years on different jobsites and alongside different finishers, I'd realized something: people don't actually understand how much goes into a good drywall finish. Builders didn't always get why a finish took as long as it did. Homeowners thought tape was something you just wet and stick to the wall. And finishers themselves were often doing things the way they'd been taught without ever being shown another way.

So I started breaking it down. Not just what I was doing — why it worked. Why the compound consistency matters. Why the angle of your knife changes what the mud does. Why things fail. All the little things that took me years to learn.

THE TRADE IS WORTH TEACHING.

I've been lucky enough to learn from some really good finishers. Some were old-school. Some had completely different ways of doing things. And I listened. Sometimes their way became my way. Sometimes it didn't. But I learned something from almost everyone.

I think that's how a trade gets better: you learn, you try, you share, someone else takes it further. That's what I want Drywall Shorty to do. Not gatekeep. Not pretend there's only one way to do something. And definitely not make people feel stupid for not knowing.

Teach the trade. Elevate the trade. Have a little fun while we're doing it. Because drywall is hard work — even people who've been doing it for decades have days where the mud is everywhere, nothing is working, and you're wondering what the hell is wrong with you. We're allowed to laugh about that.

AND YES, I'M A WOMAN IN THE TRADES.

But that's never been the point. I didn't walk onto a jobsite thinking I had something to prove because I'm a woman. I wanted to be good at drywall. That's it. My livelihood has always depended on showing up, doing the work, doing it well, and doing it on time.

The trade doesn't care what you are. The wall certainly doesn't. You have to do the work.

That's the lesson I hope people take from my career — not that a woman can do drywall, but that you can become good at something if you're willing to learn, listen, work, and keep showing up.

WHAT DRYWALL SHORTY HAS BECOME

I never set out to build any of this — that's probably the strangest part. What started as a funny name and a few videos has turned into a community of more than two million people who want to learn more about the trade. I've spoken internationally, taught at major industry events, and worked with some of the biggest names in construction.

But the messages that mean the most aren't about numbers. They're the ones that say:

“I followed your advice and finally got it.”

“I didn't think I could do this, but I tried it because I watched you.”

That's the stuff that gets me. Because ultimately, that's what Drywall Shorty is about:

GIVING PEOPLE THE CONFIDENCE TO TACKLE THE JOB THEY THOUGHT THEY COULDN'T.

You don't have to be perfect the first time. You just have to be willing to try. And if you screw it up?

It's drywall. We can fix it.