Ride of her life: The incredible journey of renovation queen Cherie Barber

Emblazoned along the bottom edge of Cherie Barber's hulking work truck, parked on the street outside her inner western Sydney home, is a CV of sorts, depicted in the logos of the TV networks and programs that have beamed her into homes across Australia.

The celebrity renovator has appeared on Channels 7, 9 and 10, on programs like The Living Room, Today and, most recently, Space Invaders, which stages "interventions" with families struggling against clutter, Barber's role being to rapidly transform key rooms into beautiful spaces on a budget.

The show, which returns to the Nine Network this month for its second season, has been one of Barber's favourites. "I am usually renovating for profit, whereas this show is not about money, it is about changing people's lives. It's like 'renovating for love'."

At a time when Australians, forced inside by COVID-19, are more obsessed than ever with their homes and how they look - at the moment, the nation is spending a staggering $1 billion a month on renovations - there is a lot of the zeitgeist in showing the masses how to turn dreary rooms into Insta-worthy knockouts without breaking the bank.

"A lot of Australians watch so many of the renovation shows - it almost becomes a new norm that you have to have a really nice-looking renovated house, like keeping up with the Joneses," says Barber.

Thanks to her success in the property market and in business, Barber has no need to go budget herself. She has, however, stayed close to her hard-scrabble roots in western Sydney.

"You can take the girl out of the west, but you can't take the west out of the girl," she says. "Coming from battler origins, I understand the value of money, and I know how hard it is to make a dollar.

"Even though I never deliberately set out to become 'that renovator who does affordable, real-life, everyday renovations', it has worked out quite smart for me because that is where the bulk of Australia is any way. Most people don't have a lazy $500,000 to $1 million to renovate their homes."

She is aghast at the real estate market right now as Sydney's median house price hits a record high of $1.6 million.

"I think gosh, how are our young people going to be able to afford even just one property in their lifetime - they have got it extremely hard."

In that sense, Barber has been lucky. In work boots and wielding power tools, she's been riding Sydney's long, crazy real estate wave since 1991, when the median house price was under $300,000 and her 21-year-old self bought a $221,000 fixer-upper on a six-lane highway at West Pymble in Sydney's Upper North Shore.

"I was ahead of my time - if you go back to 1991, no one was renovating, or very few, so I was a very early adopter."

With three profitable renovations under her belt by the early noughties, Barber quit her office job to become a full-time renovator. Since then, she has bought, renovated and sold more than 100 properties, many of them in the inner west. Some of them have been quick 'flips', others she has held on to for long-term returns.

At the moment, her projects on the go include a resort at Broken Head in Byron Bay on NSW's north coast, and a farmhouse on five acres at Mulgoa, in western Sydney, in the foot of the NSW Blue Mountains which she bought the day before Inner West Review first caught up with her and is planning to flip.

There is a case that Barber has been of the Sydney property wave, rather than simply on it. More than 20,000 people have paid to learn the secrets behind her real estate fortune at Renovating for Profit, the company Barber established in 2010 which operates out of a waterfront warehouse in Balmain.

The flagship Cosmetic Renovations for Profit course teaches - for $1995 upfront, a little more in six instalments - how to "rapidly accelerate your wealth and build a property portfolio using one of the fastest property strategies around, quick cosmetic renovations", says the website.

But Barber cautions about today's red-hot market.

"People are losing their heads; I do think there is going to be a market correction late this year, if not 2023 because it is unsustainable; I think prices will start to fall. If you are buying right now you've got to have your wits about you because it is a boom, and it is not the best time to be buying unless you are going to take a long-term hold.

"Most of my students will do the buy, renovate and hold strategy, which is what I preach because long-term capital growth is what will make you wealthy."

Barber grew up in Kingswood near Penrith in Sydney's outer west, sharing a bedroom with her three siblings in a single-level, red brick house on a battleaxe block. Her dad had an earth-removal business, and her mum did the books.

"I didn't come from a family of wealth. I came from a family that was completely broke; every day was a struggle," she says.

"We never went on overseas holidays - we hardly went on holidays at all; if we did it was to Budgewoi caravan park, that was as glamorous as it got."

Financial struggles aside, Barber describes her childhood generally as "not particularly great ... there were some issues in the family."

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Barber describes how she was pulled out of Kingswood Regional High School against her will three months before her 16th birthday, to work in her mother's flailing haberdashery shop in South Granville. Her parents had divorced, and her mother, unable to find employment, had set up the "weird-arse little shop" with a bank loan of $30,000, secured against the family home.

Barber earned $60 for two years' work in the shop - "that's how tight the money was" - before it closed down and Barber tried to go back to school.

"I went back for six weeks but it couldn't last, I had matured so much running a small business, even though it was very unsuccessful, that I just couldn't go back to the classroom environment."

She started work as a customer services representative at 3M, rising to senior product manager during her 10 years with the conglomerate, working by day and renovating by night and weekend.

"I have always been very driven. My parents didn't teach me much, but what they did teach me was always to be an honest and ethical person - and, particularly my dad taught me to be a very hard worker."

Her third renovation - in Oxford Street, Rozelle - sold for $955,000 in 2002, a suburb record that netted her $268,000 clear for eight weeks' work.

"I thought, 'this is my sliding doors moment in life; I am going to do this seriously', so I threw in my day job."

Fast forward an eventful 20 years - during which Barber picked up the epithet of Australia's renovation queen - she bought a home that, for the first time since 1991, she doesn't have to renovate. The previous owners, comedian Merrick Watts and his wife Georgie, did that, converting the former Oh Boy Candy Company 1920s warehouse into a multi-award-winning five-bedroom home with an internal pool and garden.

"I wanted something different. I really liked the idea of living in a warehouse, and I love the fact it was an old lolly factory - I am a girl who has her hand in the lolly bag all day every day so I feel like it's meant to be," Barber says.

"And it was just nice to be able to move into something and not having to be living with dust and paint cans and all of that. I am normally surrounded by renovations during the day, and now I don't actually have to sleep in it."

The $6.2 million Barber paid in February 2020 smashed the residential record for Lilyfield in Sydney's Inner West. Her previous home in Louisa Road, Birchgrove, also in the Inner West, set records when it sold in 2019.

"I bought it for $4.06 million, spent about $300,000 on a structural reno at the front of the house and sold it straight after for $6.4 million, which broke a suburb record in terms of square metre rate," Barber says.

"I have consistently broken suburb records in the inner west."

She lives at Lilyfield with her daughter Milan, a year 10 student at St Scholastica's in Glebe, her partner Matt Blackwood-Hume, a naughty cat named Snowbell, and her two chihauhaus Bella and Axel, who actually looks like a Jack Russell ("I think there were some shenanigans going on at the kennel," laughs Cherie.)

The house reveals her personal interiors vibe, a mid-century aesthetic which extends to her wardrobe of vintage-style dresses made from repurposed old curtains, bedsheets and tablecloths - and to her prize possession in the triple garage downstairs, a gleaming pink, meticulously restored, 1957 chevy called Mildred: the root of her style obsession.

Barber was living in Minnesota in 2013 filming her Five-Day Flip renovation show for America's HGTV - a series she describes as her career highlight - when she picked up Mildred at a two-day auction of 503 neglected old Chevies lined up in a dusty field in Pierce, Nebraska.

They were the unsold merchandise of the local Lambrecht Chevrolet dealership, many with only a few miles on the clock. About 15,000 people attended, including the cast and crew of Top Gear, and the crowd went wild when it was announced that one of the classic cars was Australia-bound.

Back in NSW, Barber had Mildred restored and occasionally takes her out for a spin, although the narrow streets of the inner west make it tricky.

And every year, she and Mildred chauffeur kids from her old outer west stomping ground to their end-of-school formals - "It's great fun; you get there and the whole street's out to watch."

Barber at 51 has no plans to slow down. Financially, she says she could have retired 10 years ago, but she's a workaholic. "100 per cent," she says. "And anal retentive, compulsive, all of those things, but they have got me to where I am today - you don't get ahead in life by lying on the couch watching TV all day.

"I don't unwind ... I can't unwind, I can't even go and get a facial for an hour, I'm twitching after five minutes. I've got to keep moving."

Barber has never done an interior design course but has learned those skills, and many others, on the job; she paints, landscapes, tiles, sands floors - "all the basic stuff" - but calls in the tradies for the rest.

"I am a big believer in paying it forward and I take incredible joy in creating work for lots of other people," she says.

"My projects would have really terrible quality if I tried to do it all myself; it doesn't matter if you're doing a budget or a big reno, it's got to be good quality."

In the end, renovating just doesn't feel like work to Barber.

"It is a hobby that I just love and I happen to earn fantastic money from. I just don't know what else I'd be doing - I don't know anything else but renovating, and I am ok with that."