Check out “Sell This House” on A&E. It’s my kind of home improvement show. They only do enough to make it look good for the open house, and who cares if it’s a good job?
For instance: Why mask off stuff before you paint? You can just be careful with your roller. Why replace an ugly carpet? You can just dump a big bamboo rug on it. Why remove wallpaper? You can just paint over it.
My kind of show…
I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if the cast of Trading Spaces suddenly cried out in terror and was suddenly silenced.
If Vern Yip says the wallpaper always comes down before painting, the wallpaper always comes down. Vern is Jesus, and you’d better not forget it!
Can’t remember which designer, but someone on “Trading Spaces” DID have her folks paint over the wallpaper. “It’ll look fine, we’re priming first, no one will look that closely,” etc. :eek:
As I recall, it was in fact one of the first things the owners noticed. Not the most thrilled couple were they.
I recently painted over a border that was put on with LIQUID FUCKING NAILS (on bead board, no less). I don’t know how else to handle this debacle, unless I tear the wall down. I may mount lighting across it. I am such a dork.
That’s for the benefit of the audience, like a running commentary.
I can’t stand Trading Spaces, but I do like Clean Sweep because I like to see the individual psychology of the pack rats laid bare by the act of being forced to get rid of their shit. I’m a major pack rat, and my sad confession here is that Clean Sweep actually inspired me to toss a whole bunch of stuff that had been accumulating in my apartment. We’re talking magazines dating back to 1997, junk mail from college, and various useless bits of trash I didn’t even know I still had. On Clean Sweep you’re guaranteed to see people throw massive fits about the most trivial objects, and often get down to WHY they keep them even when they don’t even know where they are.
Clean Sweep is my wife’s favorite too, but she views it from the end of somebody who can’t stand to have unused “junk” lying around the house. Think of it as a sadistic priest joyously viewing all those unrepentant sinners writhe in hell and you’ll get the picture. 
“While you were out” has to be the worst - they create the most hideous, cheap looking tacky “themes” imaginable. A memorable one was the house that had a bizarre sorta cowboy type thing going on - patio table tops with rope glued on top. Wouldn’t that get moldy and nasty with the first rain? Eww!
I like the Scotiabank commercials that take the piss out of that show - “You like the lake, so we brought the lake to you!” In the commercial a woman comes home to a horrible faux cabin in her bedroom complete with loons flying from the ceiling fan.
You sure about that? I heard an interesting segment on Marketplace by someone who got her house done on one of those shows. They can’t afford carpenters, so they use interns from the show. They also absolutely, positively got to get it done on time, and if they cut a few corners, they can just make sure the camera doesn’t see it. The new floorboards on her house got totally botched. It seems a lot of victims of these shows have to spent thousands of bucks to put their houses right again. It isn’t the decorating that’s the problem, it’s that the renovations were poor quality. One of the shows said that they weren’t actually redecorating, they were just giving an example of what real redecorating would look like.
Can’t swear that this is true, but it makes sense. If time is running out, why not throw a rug over the screwup?