Flip or Flop. Fixer Upper. Property Brothers. Income Property. Rehab Addict. Our living room TV’s default channel is HGTV. These home-improvement reality shows are always on in my house. Contractors and home owners are always tearing out walls, most of which are load-bearing. They’re always opening up spaces, making architectural details pop, bringing in natural light. At some point in the middle of an episode, the contractor always has bad news, and the bad news always costs thousands of dollars and a delay of at least a week. But the reveals in the closing minutes allow the homeowners to live happily ever after in their gorgeous, unrecognizable living spaces or, instead, to sell their renovated homes at tremendous profits.
HGTV contractors, house flippers, and homeowners are all beautiful people—handsome, rugged men and beautiful, strong women who aren’t afraid of getting dirty or making decisions about paint colors or tiles for the foyer. They all know their way around a router or a tile-cutter or a concrete countertop. They make home renovation and repair look easy, accessible, and quick, always finishing the job in a single episode. When I watch an episode of one of these shows, I finish with a feeling of completion. Look at the dramatic differences between this kitchen’s before and after footage! See how this stain raises the wood grain! Appreciate how the spa-quality en suite bathroom has added thousands of dollars of equity in the home! And all these contractors and homeowners can speak without a script; they’re masters of improvement improv and ad lib. What should we call these charming HGTV stars? Television personalities? Show hosts? Reality actors?
Meanwhile, I watch from the comfort of my living room La-Z-Boy, remote in hand, suspecting that I’ve seen this episode before, thinking about starting some laundry, noticing the latest issue of House Beautiful or Southern Living on our coffee table. I am consciously sluggish, inert, passive—the polar opposite of the HGTV personalities performing their peppy productivity on my flat screen. I try not to think about my ongoing list of our own home improvement projects: re-painting the guest bathroom, re-tiling the laundry room floor, installing cabinets above the washer and dryer, cleaning out the garage. The list goes on and on, and we’re always adding to it. I think of it as a twenty-year list, which relieves me from any sense of immediate ambition.
These home improvement shows should spark my own productivity. I should be motivated by this guy who in less than sixty minutes upgraded a grungy basement into a two-bedroom apartment rentable for $800/month. I should be inspired by the couple who work without ever arguing to renovate a client’s ramshackle ranch while playing with their four adorable young children. But I’m neither motivated nor inspired. Instead, I’m exhausted. All that work in such a short amount of time—I’m weary from watching. The representation of all that work is nearly overwhelming.
These shows present a fantasy of home renovation, compressing all the decisions and all the tasks and all the setbacks of several months of work into single one-hour episode. The menial labor of bricklaying or installing a wood floor is condensed and excerpted into a highlight reel, sped up impossibly, magically, deceitfully. Witnessing work in such heavily edited shows is perhaps even more work than an hour of actual renovation work.
But I’m enchanted by this episode's repurposed French doors and the shiplap on that accent wall; they’d look great in our laundry room. Maybe I’ll add those items to our twenty-year list.
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