#5. BE IT EVER SO HUMBLE

---

 When I was a kid, I loved to watch The Brady Bunch. I had little interest in the characters; I watched it to see the house. Such a cool modern house. The kitchen had beautiful wood cabinets and orange Formica counter tops. We had neither cabinets nor counter tops in our old kitchen, but at the age of fourteen, I saved up my allowance and bought a can of paint. One day, while my mom was at work, I painted the cracked plaster walls of our dingy old kitchen a bright, shiny orange. She sure was surprised when she came home from work that day! I’ll bet it was hideous, but I thought it brought our family a little closer to Brady Bunch status.

I continued honing my decorating skills on each of our apartments. With various jobs at burger joints, a nursing home, and even pumping gas, I saved up enough money to purchase home improvement supplies and fix up our dingy surroundings.

I couldn’t wait to get out on my own, and when I was seventeen, my sister and I moved out and shared a small apartment. We had some wild and crazy decorating ideas for that place, which included navy blue batik sheets on the bedroom walls and carpet tiles on the walls on the tiny entryway. The carpet tiles managed to cover up the cracked plaster, and was also a great way for our kitten, Huggy Bear, to climb the walls.

We upgraded to a larger apartment, where for the first time in my life I had my very own bedroom. It was actually a large closet, but it had a window and it could fit a twin size bed and a small dresser. For someone who had always shared a room with sisters, a room of my own was paradise, even with a closet pole above my bed!

After high school, I was working in New York City, at Bloomingdale’s Department Store, and taking night classes at The New York School of Interior Design. Within a few years, both my sister and I married, and I wanted more than anything to actually own a home.  

 We moved to Massachusetts, to my husband’s hometown and bought an old home in the center of town which needed a lot of work. I was excited to take on a fixer-upper and put my interior design knowledge to use. I set to work, scraping off layers of old wallpaper from every surface, including the ceilings! After a few months, the ugly house became more of a home, but I was homesick for my family and friends back in New Jersey. We decided to sell the house at a nice profit and move back to New Jersey, where we bought another ugly house and did a quick cosmetic face lift and sold that at a profit, too. Then we rented an apartment and started the search for our ‘forever’ home. 

 It sat majestically upon a hill in the quaint little town of Lafayette, NJ, which at that time boasted a population of more cows than people. It was a lovely old farmhouse, built in the 1830’s, with 13 rooms and over an acre of land. For someone who had grown up in cramped city apartments, this was paradise.

As I gazed at the house, with stars in my eyes, I could almost see the white picket fence and the rose-covered trellis. What everyone else saw was the sign on the door that said, “CONDEMNED BY THE BOARD OF HEALTH!” 

The house had been abandoned for years. All the pipes had frozen and burst, the toilets were cracked and there were piles of trash left behind by the tenants, when it had been illegally converted into a three family apartment building. But I saw the potential, and what people call ‘good bones’ and we bought it. As soon as we had one sink and one toilet working, we moved in. It was June so we didn’t have to worry about having no heat. 

 Since we didn’t have the luxury of living somewhere else during construction, I pitched a tent in the corner of one room for Nick to play in, so he would be protected from falling plaster as I proceeded to dig in and bring the house back to its former glory. 

 The transformations are so incredible, and it’s all accomplished in forty one tightly edited minutes!

The after shots are so inspiring, but the reality in this reality show is that the clients don’t get to keep the furniture and accessories, which are just being used to stage the house for the show. They have to move their own stuff in when that stuff is moved back into the warehouse. If you watch these shows as carefully as I do, you will often see some of the same pieces are used in multiple episodes.

On another show a former client reported that the contractors involved in renovating the home were terrible. She said that once the reveal was done and the cameras were off, there were cracked walls, unfinished electrical work and floors which buckled a week after they were installed., and that trying to get the problems resolved through the network was a huge hassle.

It’s all a facade. It’s the illusion that the process of finding a house and transforming it into your Dream Home is one of ease and within your grasp. We want the fantasy ,  the forty-two minute transformation, with no paperwork, headaches or sleepless nights .

Since the majority of us don’t have a construction crew in our back pocket, the reality is that it takes months, or even years, to complete a renovation project. Some of the houses I purchased were done in under a year, but that was with the intention of selling them to move on to another home. One was a fifteen year project, which probably never would have gotten done if it weren’t for the sad circumstances which made it time to move on.