Issue Date: September 26, 2004

In this article: Do it yourself Tips from Ty Pennington & Lou Manfredini

HOME & GARDEN

Makeover madness
From "While You Were Out" to "Monster House," quickie renovations look great on Day One. But do they last?
By Dennis McCafferty

"Ty and I agree," Lou says, "that all these ome makeover shows give people confidence when it comes to improving their own homes."

The cruelest thing about all of these home makeover TV shows? They present themselves in the guise of frothy, harmless self-help programs, then proceed to confront us with our inadequacies. We've all had rooms in our homes that simply serve as -- excuse us! -- rooms. Rooms intended for the purposes of sleeping, cooking or planting upon the couch with a large tub of popcorn. Then the home makeover show with its glib, tool-wielding crew walks in and immediately "sees" what's eluded the rest of us.

They can cut up strips of red theatrical lighting, place it in a window, then show us how we can simulate the sunsets of Sedona right in our kitchens. And, yes, while we realize we can remove bricks from a living room wall to make way for shelves, too many of us don't have a clue as to exactly what tools one uses to extract said brick. That is, until the makeover show folks arrive.

And they're arriving more than ever. Between HGTV and its sister network, DIY, as well as the Discovery Channel and sister network TLC, there are no fewer than 34 home makeover shows on the air. These are the kinds of shows where someone will utter a line like "We're going to make the room very exotic and erotic -- tantric, actually" without a trace of irony. Still, these crews seemingly perform miracles: A cluttered office magically grows larger. A pair of leopard-skin ottomans is repurposed as a nifty coffee table. A back yard becomes a Roman palace.

At USA WEEKEND, though, we wondered how the TV makeover looks long after the last speck of drywall dust has been swept. Ultimately, are the homeowners better off? We found that the overall experiences turn out pretty much the way things do in real life: Some participants are ecstatic. Some are pleased, even though they had to change some details. Others have run into snags. And one participant admits that, even with a reorganization, she still needs space.

That woman, freelance writer-editor Brice Gaillard, had HGTV's "Mission: Organization" come to her New York City apartment. It also served as her office, and, as a result, boxes packed with articles and research documents sprouted like weeds: under the kitchen table, guest chairs, the bed. "Mission: Organization" inspired Gaillard to toss out a bunch of "stuff" and to install shelves and stacking food storage containers. But, in the end, she still deals with too many boxes. "The problem is me," Gaillard says. "I don't have a system in place to deal with these boxes. I need a professional organizer. I wish I had a magic wand. But some things can't be fixed that simply."

Ah, that ever-elusive magic wand. Somehow, we fantasize that the home makeover experience works that way. But it doesn't. Just ask Nicholas Picholas, a morning radio personality in Buffalo. Although he thoroughly enjoyed his experience with the TLC program "While You Were Out," he had to deal with some problems. This is the show where someone conspires to have his or her domestic partner leave for a couple of days. Then, the "While You Were Out" people swoop in for a major renovation that costs no more than $1,500 in materials.

For Picholas, "WYWO" turned a spare room into an Egyptian spa complete with hieroglyphic tile on the wall; a life-sized, King Tut-styled sarcophagus; and a coffee table that actually doubled as a fountain. An old massage table in the room completed the spa effect. Picholas was pleased. Then the troubles began.

For starters, the tiles plopped to the floor. "They started to fall off after a couple months," Picholas says. "In the middle of the night, you could hear them go 'thud!' I had to go out and get some glue to get them back on."

Then there was that fountain. "It leaked everywhere," Picholas says. "Some of it was cracked. It was made of plexiglass, so I had to buy more of that to hold the water better. I had to level the fountain, too."

Oh, and the ceiling. "To do the shoot, they had to add lighting fixtures to make the room look brighter. But when they were finished, they pulled out the fixtures and I had holes in the ceiling. I got some putty and patched them up."

"WYWO's" representatives say that the show aims high with its renovations but that mistakes occasionally happen. "The show delivers the big-picture dream room," says Michael Klein, executive producer. "We take a journalistic approach to the transformation. We reveal everything about the process. For a marathon broadcast in which we went back to old projects, we visited again with Nicholas, and he pointed out these problems he had. And we put that on TV. We don't hide anything."

Picholas agrees, and he remains a good sport. "The show offered to pay for the repairs," he says. "But, honestly, it was only 30 bucks worth. I never expected everything to be perfect. It's like any experience with a contractor."

No need to tell that to Amy Brown, a computer instructor from Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., who had a similar experience with the landscaping show "Grounds for Improvement," which airs on DIY (Do It Yourself Network). The "Grounds" crew provided a design for a new patio to replace a decaying deck. But the patio turned out uneven. "It rains often here in Florida," Brown says. "And every time it did, we'd get 3 inches of water backed up right to our backyard door." Brown and some friends added 3 inches of sand underneath the patio to balance it out.

The "Grounds" team was apologetic and arranged to pay for the repair. "This is a very unusual situation," says Dee Haslam, who oversees production for the show. "Of the 17 shows we've done so far [as of August], there are only two examples like this, and both have been fixed. The program is unlike other home makeover shows, because it is built around the homeowners doing it themselves. We have people from the show helping oversee the process, but things can happen. A patio project will settle and move around, for example. We make the homeowners aware of this, and we help them deal with it."

Ah, imperfection. There are no second takes in life, right? Home makeover shows are no exception. In the case of music producer Rob Jacobs, of Calabasas, Calif., there was just one glaring detail after his experience with "While You Were Out" -- a mirror on the ceiling. Oh, he knew something was up when he was presented with plans to turn his bedroom into an Indian-inspired "tantric temple" of love while his wife, Kathy, went to Texas to visit family. Kathy's reaction? "I'm just a little overwhelmed now," she said on the show. "Tantric? What does that mean?"

After the crew left, the couple concluded that the room was a tad too Kama Sutra-suited. The mirror had to go. Especially because the Jacobses' 7-year-old daughter, Abigail, likes to crawl into bed with Mom and Dad. "It was more suited for the show than for us," Jacobs says.

Then again, there are times when the entire TV home makeover process turns out simply splendid. Lynn Crocker, an on-air media coordinator for BBC America from Aurora, Colo., turned to HGTV's "Designer Finals" -- which features a different student each show who oversees the planning and completion of the makeover -- to deal with a case of the blahs in her family room. Student designer Lindsey Kruger's project involved putting in bookshelves and painting dark paneling white, then sanding it down. "She made it look countrified, like faded, antique wood you'd see at a place called Joe's Crab Shack," Crocker says. "It was beautiful."

And there's not a sniff of complaint from Tyrus Mulkey, a small-business owner in Las Vegas, after his experience with Discovery's "Monster House," a show on which a team of renovators works for five days with an unlimited budget to produce some of the more elaborate makeovers you'll see on TV.

At first, Mulkey and his partner, Baird Renneckar, wanted a California winery theme for their back yard. But the "Monster House" gang had different ideas: They went with an ancient design, tearing out a backyard tool shed and putting in a Roman-styled hot tub. Fiberglass columns went up everywhere, and faux stones were added to the outside of the house. They took copper materials and some grand wooden wheels and built a bar that resembles a chariot. Three towering, flame-producing cauldrons were placed out back, too.

"When they're on, they light up the whole back yard," says an elated Mulkey. "They did things not a lot of people would have the courage to do. Once it's done, it's simply awesome."

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Doing your own home makeover: Tips from Ty Pennington & Lou Manfredini

It may seem like an odd pairing: Our home expert, Lou Manfredini, with his "heartland of America" style, and ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" (Sundays at 8 p.m. ET; season premiere this Sunday) host Ty Pennington, whose movie-star looks make it seem sexy to have sawdust all over your clothes. But it works. At a photo shoot for USA WEEKEND Magazine, they trade stories, as Pennington admits the show isn't all glitz and no grit: "I spent most of the last day swinging a sledgehammer, and my back is killing me." But he doesn't just transform homes; he transforms the lives of the people who will move back in. "It's the best job I've ever had," he says. Exclusively for us, Lou and Ty came up with these tips for a quick home makeover:

-- The secret word is ... laminate. Give your kitchen an easy face lift with a new laminate counter. They come in hundreds of colors and can cost as little as $25 a running foot. Add a new double sink and a new pull-out faucet (each about $150), and you're set.
-- Don't grunt over grout. Add an acrylic liner to your shower to eliminate ugly grout lines and make cleaning easier. Kits at hardware stores and home centers cost about $200. With a new shower curtain, towel bars and a coat of paint, a quick bathroom makeover could cost less than $400.
-- Color your world. Paint your living or family room in a strong neutral color. The avocado of the '70s is now called guacamole. Harvest gold is now terra cotta. Paint the trim in a bright white, and your rooms will sing. A new flat paint has Scotchgard in it to make walls truly washable.

Cover photograph by Patrick Harbron for USA WEEKEND.