About Us

What is NestKoo?

NestKoo is a DIY home improvement website for women

At NestKoo we share DIY home repair and painting instructional guides, with a focus on teaching women how to carry out cosmetic and basic repairs around their house, apartment or small business.

Essentially, we teach the fundamental home-owner skills that our grandparents had as second-nature, or fathers had but chose not to pass down onto their daughters, which have fallen out of common knowledge as we’ve moved to a more digital lifestyle and feel pressured to hire professionals to fix our homes instead.

We’re here to show you that DIY home improvement is not just for macho men or the older generation who grew up living the DIY lifestyle. Maintaining and fixing your own home is possible and can be a reality for you, even if you are a total beginner and were always told that power tools aren’t for girls.

We pride ourselves on helping women develop a broad knowledge on tools and techniques for maintaining your home, and explain how to choose the right tools based on their features and specifications, as well as guides for how to install or use them. At NestKoo you will find all the information and help you need to take care of your home yourself, and keep it functional and beautiful for years to come. No men required!

The NestKoo team

Our Story

Hello, we’re Sara Kooring and Rach Baxter, friends and co-owners of NestKoo!

Sara and Rach met through a permaculture course many years ago; we connected through our mutual love of nature, self-sufficiency and handicrafts, and we’ve been close friends ever since. About 5 years ago we decided on a tree-change after living in the city most of our lives. With the city house market in a bind and our hearts set on living in the bush, we decided to share our dreams of escape and bought a rural property together.

We purchased an affordable fixer-upper in country Australia, and run-down it was! The timber house had been unlived in for almost a year, and had been taken over by mice, rats, spiders and cockroaches. Some people will tell you that rats and mice don’t co-exist, but our experience proves otherwise! I still remember the first night, sleeping on a stinky rug in the middle of the lounge room, listening to a huge rat gnaw a hole in the sliding door while mice skittered around the skirting.

The previous owners left the place in a filthy, half-broken dump… a far-cry from the romantic notion of moving to the country many of us have. Needless to say, it really needing some fixing up. So, we spent the next year on a home DIY mission, patching up cracks, painting walls, fixing the water pump and solar, installing wardrobes, repairing the rodent holes, fixing doors and windows and what have you. It was a huge learning curve, and took a lot of energy. But if we could get this (former) dump of a house up to a respectable living standard using our own DIY skills, then you can too!

It looks great now, but of course, it’s still a work in progress, and like any home… there is always something to fix or improve!

Our Team

NestKoo is made up of a team of experienced writers and contributors, who love sharing their DIY home repair, home security and painting tips.

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Sara Kooring (owner)

Hi, I’m Sara. I’m trained as a fine artist (painting), but several years ago when I realized that a career as an artist is near impossible, I moved to web design, graphic design, PR and writing instead. I love being close to nature, and my main area of specialty in NestKoo is DIY Painting, where I bring my skills in classical fine art and contemporary design together into a practical home DIY context.

You can read about Sara’s experiences and challenges from around the NestKoo house in the Sara’s Stories segment.

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Rach Baxter (owner)

I grew up on a sheep farm in Australia with four siblings and moved to the city in my early teens. We had great parents that taught us heaps of essential home DIY skills and basic auto repair skills. As kids, we spent most weekends in the farm or yard, fixing a tractor or putting up a shed, or helping the neighbors with odd jobs; essential life skills that I still use today at home or helping others.

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Martina Gray (former contributor)

Martina Gray is a former contributor on NestKoo. The daughter of two tradespersons, Martina grew up learning how to DIY whatever was needed to keep their home (or car) standing. Her specialty is in home security and safety, and she has published several articles on this and other home DIY topics.

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Todd Davis (former contributor)

Todd Davis is a former contributor on NestKoo. A jack of all trades, Todd has been a DIY enthusiast, traveler, and writer for many years. He has a deep understanding of all types of painting tools and door hardware, and has shared many articles on these topics throughout the years.

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Justine Brown (former contributor)

This is Justine, I’m an interior designer with a soft spot for furniture, including choosing the right chairs and furnishings for your home decor, making and reusing preloved pieces, as well as upholstery maintenance. Justine is a former contributor on NestKoo, where she has written several articles on furniture repair and refurbishment.

Why NestKoo?

As female home-owners and avid DIYers ourselves, we want to share the knowledge we’ve learnt with likeminded women, who are enthusiastic to learn DIY home improvement skills but need help getting started. While we enjoy discussing and writing about the benefits of owning and maintaining a home, we want to do more. As women, we are tired of being made to feel like home improvement is a man’s job.

We are sick of being made to feel like we don’t have control over our own living spaces simply because we don’t understand how to use the tools to fix or change it. And we are tired of not getting the help we need from the males in our lives to learn these skills, even when we ask to be shown how, simply because of an underlying toxic belief system that “it’s a man’s job”.

DIY home repair, painting and improvement skills are not masculine skills owned by the male portion of our society. They are essential life skills that should be available to everyone, regardless of gender or age. NestKoo is here to empower women to carry out their own home repairs, and help show them how to do it.

Affiliate Disclosure – Financial Transparency

To cover costs of running this website, pay writers and pay for our own living and DIY home improvement expenses (we gotta live too, after all!) we do earn commissions from product links on this website. It’s how we can afford to do the work that we do, and we don’t mind being upfront and honest about that.

How does that work? We are reader-supported, which means if you use one of our links to buy a product, we earn a small commission as an Amazon affiliate. This does not mean we compromise on our reviews, we will still only ever recommend products that we genuinely believe will work for you. If you like the sound of a product, please follow the product links in the article so we may earn a few dollars while you get the product you need; you wont get charged any extra for doing so. Only through this mutual system can we continue to afford sharing this great information with women around the world.

Thank you so much for your visit to NestKoo. If you have any questions, are interested in contributing as a writer, or have ideas for future articles please feel totally free to drop us a line on our contact page.

Many thanks and happy DIYing,

Sara and Rach