This DIY photo got such a huge reaction, it was taken down

When Laura Ryan posted a photo of her boyfriend doing some DIY, she had no idea it would go viral.

Ryan, a recruitment officer from Queensland, posted a few snaps of her partner of two years, electrician Lloyd Westwood on a shared Kmart hacks Facebook group on Sunday night. He'd helped her attach a $3 sheet of purple contact to her IKEA desk to create a makeup table.

"It was a spontaneous DIY project to make it look nicer," Ryan tells 9Honey. "I was so impressed with how it turned out, I couldn’t help but share it."

But it wasn't the table that caught the forum's attention.

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So many comments flooded in appreciating Westwood's, er, physique, the group's moderators – in an attempt, one assumes, to keep things on the slightly safer track of home craft projects – disabled the thread after just an hour.

"By then it was up to around 80 comments," Ryan tells 9Honey, adding that the post was removed altogether within 24 hours.

The original post. Image: Facebook/Laura Ryan

"I have always captured in-the-moment photos of Lloyd doing things around the house or playing with the dogs so these kinds of photos weren’t abnormal," Ryan says.

"The post was completely innocent and the comments were so unexpected but once the first comment was made by one member, the rest was history – they just poured through so fast."

"Where in Kmart do I find him?" one commenter asked.

"Which aisle?" added someone else.

"Sorry I can’t see the table because those muscles are too distracting," one woman wrote.

"There was a table in that 2nd pic???" wrote another.

"I was trying to continue with the humour," Ryan tells 9Honey. "I replied saying they could find something like Lloyd in the hubba bubba section."

Laura Ryan. Image: Facebook

She's not at all bothered by Westwood's surprise moment in the spotlight.

"I honestly did not expect such a huge response on Lloyd’s masculine appearance," she says. "But I didn’t take the comments seriously because it was all included in the fun of it."

And Lloyd also took the attention in his stride.

"It was a normal day at work [for him] the next day," Ryan says. "Nothing else has changed."

She is looking forward to their next DIY project, however.

"I’ll make sure his shirt is off for the Kmart Mums of Australia – he has to keep his title somehow!"

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