Decorating Sense - November, 2007

I have a disease you can only get from watching too much Home & Garden TV (HGTV). It is a combination of a profound feeling of ineptitude and a bit of decorator envy. I battle it with a healthy sense of reality, but I cannot resist the strain.

From what I have seen on TV, I should be doing more to my home. Decorators are able transform any home into Provence. Homeowners are suddenly able to use table saws to build bookcases or fashion drapes out of old bedspreads. You have to wonder on what planet do these people reside, because getting the beautification of our homes done in real life is nothing like what we see on TV.

Each week on ABC’s “Extreme Makeover, Home Edition,” Ty Pennington and his capable crew find some poor family living in what resembles a refrigerator box or suffering from some rare disease so they can perform a miraculous “extreme makeover” on the home in one week while the family is sent off on a luxurious vacation. This “makeover” frequently involves demolishing the house (in which Ty seems to take considerable glee, brandishing a bulldozer like a 5-year old playing in the sandbox with his new trucks). Ty enlists the aid of hundreds of local people – some neighbors, some contractors and tradespeople – who simultaneously descend on the house and make it rise from the ashes into a mansion designed for the special needs of the family. This is a fantastic sight to see, and I often find myself choked up and weepy as the stunned family tours its incredible new home.

But in the real world, where I live, I can’t help but wonder: How did they get the permits and the inspections done in a week? How did they get the carpenters, electricians, plumbers and painters to show up – in the correct sequence and timed just right to complete the project? When was the last time you called for service and even got a call back, or had the person show up when they said they would, or complete the job on time? I have one friend who is still waiting for the air conditioning guy to finish her cooling system and it is now November, so she now needs him to finish the heat. How do Ty & Co. get the furniture delivered in less than eight weeks? And at a time when someone is home and no one gets in the way? And would your general contractor – assuming you ever see him again – decide that in addition to the honor of building your home he will pay off your mortgage? In what fantasy world does this happen?

And it’s not just Ty that makes me notice the difference between TV and real life. On one Home & Garden program the decorating crew spends less than $50 – $50! – to redecorate a room, relying largely on materials already on hand in the homeowners’ garage or basement. Maybe it pays to be a packrat, but do you have enough spare fabric around to slipcover that old couch and make matching drapes? Do the scraps of wood in your garage add up to a new dining room table? And can your leftover paint be used to create a new Tuscan feel in your kitchen?

On another program, where the budget is a more comfortable $500, much of the furniture and many of the accessories come from items found at yard sales for truly bargain prices. These budget-friendly treasures can be used as is or they are miraculously transformed into something that fits perfectly into the new decorating scheme. Who keeps that much stuff around, and, if “Decorating Cents” didn’t show up on your doorstep, what would you do with what will inevitably be labeled junk if you let it keep piling up? Let’s face it, if the homeowners watched and followed the tenets of another HGTV program, “Mission Organization,” that clutter would have been at the landfill by now.

On “Designed to Sell,” first a real estate woman (it is always a woman, and they are looking for bitchy ones at that) comes in and rips apart the home about to be placed on the market. The furniture is shoddy, the kitchen is outdated and the place is always too cluttered, she’ll declare. Then a decorator, two carpenters, the host and the homeowners – following the ideas of the decorator – come in and for under $2,000 they will eliminate all of these problems and make the house attractive to potential buyers. And they perform this miracle in TWO DAYS! I had three rows of tile replaced and it took nearly a week – a day for removing the old tile, a day to tile, a day to grout, a day to seal – and I thought I got off easy.

But then again, I live in the real world. What you see on TV amounts to the Gilligan’s Island of remodeling, where you have to suspend your sense of reality to accept and enjoy any of it. Of course, if an army of skilled craftsmen and interior designers showed up on my doorstep, sent me on a vacation and rebuilt my house, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?