A long while ago HGTV had a show hosted by a deep-voiced woman who gave a hundred bucks to a crafter who then re-made a room. These rooms looked exactly like you’d expect. Some of the crafters did rise to the occasion but most made cheesy, chintzy and cheap looking crap-- and the host could not either design or craft.
There also was a show where the host re-arraigned your furniture. That was it. She moved crap around. Sometimes she took something from another room. This was a show for people who were too dumb to move their sofa more than two feet away from a door.
The worst show right now? Home by Novogratz in which a Flowers in the Attic couple fill apartments with expensive stuff made to look cheap in garish colors and jarring designs.
Any shows you hate (or hated?) Include DIY network if you get it.
Know what gets me about that show? Those guys look almost exactly alike except one is handsome and one isn’t. Their faces show that design is very important- one one thousandths of a millimeter in placement means so much to how good things look.
I LOVE the Property Brothers so much we’ve been looking for a fixer-upper our own selves.
I hated “Trading Spaces,” in part because they had such a low budget to work with. Plus, because they had to do everything so quickly, quality suffered. Then we have Hildi, the decorator from hell. She glued HAY to a wall, for pete’s sake. Let’s hope none of the homeowner’s guests smoked!
I think that was technically straw. Not that that makes it any better, mind you.
Although I freely admit I haven’t watched HGTV in several years. I have a deeply limited interest in watching people flip or shop for houses or spend several thousand dollars having professionals completely redo their house/yard. I watched a lot of it back when they had crafting shows and budget design shows like Design Remix, though.
I don’t care if it’s DIY.
I actually kinda like Decked Out, the hostseems to know what he’s talking about, I’m willing to bet he’s done this professionally, but I’ll bet he stinks of Axe and hairgel and he probably sits in his car every morning trying to decide which necklaces to wear and going through his douche bag catch phrase book. To make it worse, I’ll bet he was normal a few years ago and then glammed it up when he saw the cameras. Sometimes it’s like the douche thing doesn’t come naturally to him and that he’s actually striving for it.
Which one did the wine stickers in the kitchen, despite protests. The friends told the designers over and over that the homeowners were teetotalers and would have no interest in every inch of wall space being covered in wine labels (one type). She did it anyways. The homeowners walked in, said it was neat looking, but it’s coming down.
Nevermind, it was Hildi
Someone also glued feathers to a wall, the homeowners tore that down and said the found feathers for months all over the house.
And it seemed like at least once a month one of the designers decided that the the entire wall surface needed to be covered in fabric. I get that it saves time, but it’s ugly and no one actually wants it.
I think the problem was that this show as trying to show you what you can do for a grand…and failing miserably most of the time. Then you have other makeover shows that spend 25 grand which is great makeover porn, but they buy vanity mirrors or faucets that are out of my entire makeover budget for the room. It’s like they need to find a nice middle ground. How about instead of $1000 and 2 days, you give them $1000 and a week so they have more time to scout around and find deals and don’t come back with cheap and bizarre wall coverings or shag couches from Good Will to recover. Or better yet, let’s give them $2500 so they don’t have to worry about deals, they can spend less time hunting for cheap stuff and just go to a real furniture store and get decent supplies from the “Home Improvement Store” with all the orange racking behind them and in the mean time, give me “Joe Homeowner” some actual ideas to work with for my house. I can take these ideas and find ways to make them cheaper or go bargain shopping on my time.
Maybe they could have a little section at the end when they tally everything up where they explain that they spent $2500 but $1200 was tied up in the new couch and only $400 was spent on that really cool textured faux finish on the ceiling.
Did you ever watch Design on a Dime? I think it started with $1000 and may have been upped to $2000. This is exactly what they did at the end of their show-- to show how they stayed in budget. They did fantastic things with a thousand bucks. Of course if I had a contractor, designer and-- most importantly-- a carpenter, I could do great things with a thousand bucks too.
But why am I talking about Design on a Dime? That was one of my most favorite shows. This thread is supposed to be for the worse ones.
DIY has their “Crashers” series and I love them all. Except Kitchen Crashers. Because the girl who does kitchens is a real bitch whose best talent is her cleavage. And she’s not afraid to us it, either!
I hear you but I think ALL the deals, everything they find, actually comes from the amazing warehouse. The producers have staffers buying stuff all the time and stashing it until it’s needed for one of their shows.
One of the real estate shows with a young British (I think) woman who positively sneered at everything. It was one of those like Real Estate Intervention where the homeowners weren’t able to sell their house (always because it looked like crap and they wanted too much). I think it was another show, though. That woman’s nasty attitude was such a turn-off. Yes, the orange and brown couch from the sixties is revolting, but she doesn’t need to go on and on about how moronic the owners are.
There was one show, I can’t remember the name of it, about some woman (I think she was french-canadian with a bad dye job) who started her own real estate business. I just thought she was a very unpleasant person. On one episode she was complaining about how inexperienced her staff was, even though she just finished talking about how she wanted nothing but young up and comers.
Technically-technically, straw is hay. It’s dried out oat hay. My mare did not care for certain cuts of oat hay, and it started turning into straw bedding. Orchard grass hay it was, then.
But yes, Trading Spaces was horrendous on many levels.
Technically-technically-technically, straw usually refers to the nonnutritious stalk of a wheat plant, or the mature, coarse remaining stalk of any fully ripened and harvested grain. Oat hay was cut and dried while green, that’s what makes it hay.
Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh right. Hildi. Remember her hideous grey-and-hot-pink “circus tent.” OMG it was oppressive, not to mention impossible to clean.
I nominate “While You Were Out.” I only saw it a few times but I am not a fan of “ambush” redecoration and it seemed like the spouse/partner was usually displeased. It was a marital strife generator more than a design show.
Oh! And the show where they are looking for rentals overseas. It’s like “House Hunters International” except for its rentals. These people are crazybananas with their impossible demands. "I want to live in Paris proper, in a location convenient to everything, but in a building with central A/C and a pool… Oh, and my budget wouldn’t get me a studio in Des Moines. " I don’t understand why there aren’t more stabbings by the realtors on this show.
