A woman on TikTok has gained notoriety for an unusual home improvement project: digging a tunnel that is 30 feet long and 20 feet deep under her suburban home in the Northeast.
Kala, 37, became known as TikTok’s “tunnel girl” after she started documenting her journey of excavating below her house in October 2022. The underground tunnel is intended to be a storm shelter, though she said she primarily took on the project to challenge herself. She enjoys working on ambitious home improvement projects and previously constructed a four-story addition to the back of her house.
Kala, who requested that her full name and location not be used due to safety concerns, said she started to think last year about adding an additional secure space to her home, which she owns, underneath the existing basement.
“I wouldn’t say doomsday bunker, because I’m not really a prepper or concerned about that kind of thing at all, but I just thought it would be neat to have like a little protective shelter area,” Kala said in an interview. “And so I started working on that. And also it’s a challenge and I live for challenges. It keeps me preoccupied and keeps me entertained.”
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In documenting her excavations, she has gained over 330,000 followers on her TikTok account, @engineer.everything. Her journey has prompted a flurry of video responses, as well as a subreddit thread, titled “Can anyone explain what’s going on with tunnel girl (Kala) to me?”
She’s become the latest person to captivate the internet for documenting an obscure hobby, following the likes of “eel pit guy” in 2022, who went viral for turning an unused rainwater cistern under his garage into a pond for eels.
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