Dani Klarić, a popular home content creator, tells PEOPLE about some of the craziest things she’s encountered while working to renovate old homes
NEED TO KNOW
- Dani Klaric shares her journey renovating her 1930s Miami home, uncovering termites, water damage and hidden issues
- The interior designer documents the chaotic process online, including raccoons in her chimney and a termite infestation
- Klaric embraces the challenges as content for her followers, blending her eclectic style with unexpected renovation hurdles
Home decor content creator and interior designer Dani Klarić finds it hard to describe her design style.Online, to her over 3.8 million social media followers, the influencer shows off her colorful interior design staging and renovation projects.“I like to say that my own personal style is just eclectic and colorful design, and it depends on what I’m designing,” she tells PEOPLE. “I’ll make cottage-core colorful and eclectic. I’ll make mid-century modern colorful or eclectic.”
Essentially, there’s “no name for her” style, but she does say that she takes a lot of inspiration from retro spaces. In fact, two of her most recent projects (houses that she purchased that she calls the Savannah Home and the Miami Home, respectively) are older houses that she purchased in order to then completely gut them.“My audience and I love old homes, and with old homes come a lot of problems,” she says. Her house that she is currently documenting the renovation of in Miami was built in the 1930s. Around that time, houses in the city were built primarily with wood.
“I bought the house, the inspection passed, everything looked fine,” says Klarić. “But what you don’t get from inspections are what the inside of the walls look like. You would have to break a wall to really know what the inside looks like.”Along the way, she discovered gorgeous pink tiles in her bathroom that had been painted over by the person who sold her the house. She started a series, documenting the removal process of the paint. Eventually, she gave up on the process upon realizing that the tiles underneath were cracked and beyond saving.
@daniklaric
rip my termite family 😔
♬ original sound – dani klarić
“When we took off the tiles, we started to open up the walls to redo the plumbing, and I found a termite nest on that wall in that bathroom,” she tells PEOPLE. “It was literally so gross, and that’s when I found out there was termites and then there was water damage. I just feel like in old homes, as soon as you rip open one wall, that’s where your life is over.”“Stuff just keeps happening and popping up, and there’s so many things,” she says. “The plumbing was broken, there was holes in the pipes. I mean, this house is super old. So really, the house was bought [and] flipped. They just painted the walls, made it look nice, but the inside was rotten.”
In the end, Klarić had to redo the entire foundation of the house as a result of the water damage and the destruction from the termites. A termite inspector revealed that Klarić had subterranean termites.“He said that I had probably 10 years until my house caved in and just fell in [because] of how much the termites ate, so we have to fix it,” she shares.As if subterranean termites weren’t enough, Klarić says there has just been “situation after situation,” including two errant raccoons that have moved into the chimney of her Miami house.However, it’s a testament to Klarić’s work ethos that she would never call these “situations” a “problem.” “At the end of the day, I’m like, ‘I’m having so much fun.’ The raccoons are probably still there as we speak.”
Klarić says her social media followers often ask her why she doesn’t sue the previous owners of the house for not disclosing the termites. “Although it sounds so easy to do, I’m like, ‘Whatever.’ I bought the house as is. I did my inspection, so there’s really nothing I could do,” she adds.“I don’t want to say I have fun with problems. Obviously, it’s more money, and so that’s the only upsetting part. But if I can do content and I can share it with my audience and we can learn as we go, I think it’s very fun. It’s a win-win, honestly, documenting this whole process.”It’s for that reason that Klarić believes people love following along with her personal projects more than the ones she posts for her clients.
“My clients’ projects are all so organized, so planned, they’re so great, and so there’s only like, ‘Hi, we’re decorating this, we designed this, and it looks like this, and it’s perfect.’”On the other hand, she says, “My house is like, ‘We’re getting down and dirty. Oh, my god, guys, there’s a family of raccoons. We have a termite family as well. My house is falling down. It’s so chaotic.’ But that’s honestly my life; my life is just so chaotic,” she laughs…