Whenever I watch House Hunters International, I wind up thinking, “that person’s life is very different from mine.” It seems like it’s always some casually wealthy 32 year old guy who’s shopping for a $500K condo in Buenos Aires because sometimes he likes to get away for the weekend.
I’ve noticed the same thing. I saw one HHI episode about a couple moving to a fairly small town in Italy. They kept going on and on about how much they LOVED the rustic, simple lifestyle, they wanted to get away from American materialism and hustle-and-bustle, etc. Then, in a couple of shots of them going to town, it appeared that their Italian consisted of a few sentences memorized from a phrase book, and pronounced like the guys in Inglourious Basterds (“Bonn-JORE-no!”) I was like, “this is why people hate Americans.”
open floor plan , stainless steel appli ugh I am so sick of hearing that . I dont want peole watch me cooking . adn stainless steel is very hard to clean.
I felt like a douche the other day when I was looking at houses for my dad and uttered the words, “Ohh, really great tray ceilings and the matching granite throughout is great!”
Any time we visit my mom, who has moderate alzhimers we watch stuff like food channel or HGTV because of shows like this, she can’t track well enough to watch a show or movie that needs you to follow a plot.
I was surfing around using stumble, and ran across a property for sale in Germany that I would kill to be able to afford to move into. Wouldn’t try to run it as a vineyard or winery or wine bar, but I love the looks of the place.
I have to really wonder about the americans on the show that are looking in foreign countries for properties, I know property laws can be very different, do they realize what they might be getting into?:dubious:
OMG, I am watching this young couple who is moving to Knoxville, and I want to punch this chick in the face!
She is bitching about curtains, appliances, countertops, the house not being 100% brick…
I specifically googled House Hunter Message Boards, just so I could complain about this hussy complaining!
Now you see why I refer to this programmer as Entitlement Whores US EEdition, as opposed to Entitlement Whores International.
The show is my guilty pleasure tv hookup.
Honestly, they show people 3 beautiful places [except for the show with the 2 guys that had like $80K for a place, and they knew they were going to be looking at seriously ‘low end’ housing market stuff] and most of the time all they do is whinge about the houses they are looking at.
I would freaking love to have almost anything they look at in every show, it is certainly better than what I live in. They would stroke out if they were shown my property.
Not to mention the ones that are looking in some tropical island paradise for a $200K to 1 mil vacation property.
The unending litany of too small, no walk in closet, no ensuite, no granite, no stainless, i hate white cabinets … :rolleyes:
This show kills me for all the reasons mentioned in the preceding posts.
The thing that kills me THE MOST is when the couples look at places in really exotic locations and then lament that the furniture, appliances, amenities aren’t like an American suburb! They don’t like the heating system or the on-demand hot water or the lack of closet space. It makes me crazy when they go into some charming, authentically old-world place and instantly say it “needs updates”! My kitchen cupboards are from the 1940’s and they’ve never been updated. (Come to think of it, neither have I.)
But there was one show recently that was quite odd. An Australian woman had met and fallen in love with an Indian man (really, he was more of an Indian boy). He was an aspiring musician of some sort. I think she had more of a Real Career, and she might have been a little older than he. It was not a promising situation.
And some of the apartments they looked at… wow… quite a change from the big, open HOUSE she had lived in by herself back home. He kept saying, “Oh this would make a good studio space.” :rolleyes: Yeah, these were postage-stamp sized places and he’s going to cram musical instruments in there? I believe in true love, too, but this transition looked really challenging. The places they were shown were barely habitable (I live in a broken down house in the country where the siding is falling off- so I’m not Ms. Pristine Entitlement). I really wondered if their relationship will stand the stress and culture shock.
And then at the opposite end of the spectrum was the family that lived in a palatial estate in Virginia or Georgia or something and had budgeted $2.5 million for their vacation home. Kills me.
Actually, the most interesting thing about this show to me is the interaction between the couples. Sometimes they click very well together and other times the tension is quite apparent.
Like that american couple where she had an entire list of her whims, and her husband said that she would stay up at night writing out these lists of what was in her perfect home?
And what was with her hatred of white cabinetry? Give the bitch a can of black paint and a brush and turn her loose.
Honestly, I would kill to live in some of the places that get refused for not <whatever> enough. Liguria the other night, such beautiful places. I would cook on a hotplate and microwave to live there.
Yea, some of those people drive me nuts. My wife watches the channel all the time an it drives me nuts to hear what people will say about houses and why they don’t like them. Then what really drives me nuts is when they complain about the countertops. Like if the countertop is beat to crap I understand, but I hate it when people complain when they aren’t granite. Drives me nuts!
I think the worst offender was a woman from Kansas City with a Norwegian husband. He worked for a shipping company and they were transferring him back to Norway. They had a budget of $500,000. This crazy woman balked at every house they looked at because — shocker! — they didn’t have things like air conditioners and garbage disposals. Holy crap, woman, you’re in frikkin’ NORWAY! It gets to 70 maybe 3 days a year. You don’t need an air conditioner! And if you’re going to live in Europe, you might want to get used to scraping your dishes off into the composting bin instead of just shoving everything you don’t eat down the drain! But no, she couldn’t settle for any of the really beautiful, spacious houses, and she made her husband build her a house with air conditioning and garbage disposals and all that crap. For $700,000! Jesus, if I were moving to Norway, I would stick really tightly to my budget, because everything in Norway is sooo expensive. Want a sandwich for lunch? That’s 20 bucks. Gas in your car? Eight bucks a gallon. Good Christ, lady, you might need that money later.
I just want to apologize to Norwegians everywhere for this woman. What a horrible person.
I wonder what would happen if the people on the show saw my family on it.
“Wow, this master bedroom is so nice”
“Yeah Mr. McNally, but you have four kids and there’s only two other bedrooms”
“So, they’re kids. We can buy bunk beds.”
I liked the one with the woman with a two year old and I swear she thought the girl would be two for her entire life. She rejected a house because the basement had a column with a corner.
i’ll be looking for houses soon. the one thing i dread is wallpaper in every room. my first question would be: “do you have the number of a good wallscraper”?
the house i’m in now had wallpaper in every room… one hundred year old wallpaper, that had been papered over numerous times and then painted over with lead paint a few times.
thankfully, i was given the name and number of a fantastic man who does miraculous work scraping wallpaper. the finish coat of plaster was so lovely and smooth when he was done that i would just lay against the wall and run my hands across them.
Hey, I remember this thread. Weird, cuz me and my hubby were just watching House Hunters. We like to imagine what kind of house we could buy if we could magically transport our jobs and salaries to Huntsville, TN or “just outside of Toledo”.
My husband and I are sort of casually* searching for a home right now, and I try not to laugh at some of his HouseHunters-type reactions. For example, we recently looked at a house with “lots of potential.” Yes, there were a couple of rooms with ugly wallpaper, and the house needed flooring throughout and a fair amount of interior trim needed to be replaced. And old swimming pool needed to be filled in. It was definitely stuck in the late seventies/early eighties. BUT… 5 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, separate dining room, very large heated/air conditioned sunporch, two full lots, fireplace in the living room. Convenient to schools, his work, etc. All for $82-freaking-thousand dollars. I can do a fair amount of the fix-it work myself, and I have a guy who will gladly work for a pretty low hourly rate, who is able to do a lot of the stuff I can’t. A cousin who is a plumber, and another who is an electrician. And my brother’s best friend (who lives just a few miles away) has the equipment to quickly and easily fill in the pool.
I walked away from that one thinking “$10 grand worth of labor and materials, and we’d have a $150,000 house, with only $92,000 up front.” Hubby walked away saying “but it’s so UGLY.”
So I’m trying to be realistic** in our search, and get the best value for our money, while my darling husband has absolutely no vision…
*“Casual” meaning that we have a 1.5 year timeline, and would prefer to move during summer or Christmas break. Our primary reasoning is that there is no way on God’s green earth that the kids are attending high school in the county where we live. We’re not out trying to waste realtors’ time, we’re just not on a really tight schedule.
**Despite my efforts to be realistic, though, I’ve fallen in love with the least practical house ever: So what that it’s too far away from my husband’s work, not in the “right” county, and we could never afford the upkeep. Just look at it: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/361-College-Ave-Millen-GA-30442/76468004_zpid/
good heavens! that is one gorgeous house! it is in the wrong part of the country for me, and has quite a bit of wallpaper, and way, way, to big for me (the cats would lose a bit of weight being chased from room to room, but dang! i’d buy it in a hot second.
I remember that one. Was that the same woman who was worried about the kid using stairs? Carpeted stairs? With a handrail?
The HH drinking game:
Granite
Stainless
Spacious
Natural light
Crown molding
Needs updating
That [wallpaper or paint color] has to go!
There’s enough room in this closet for my clothes – where will you put yours?
Man cave!
The neighbors are too close (sometimes they’re right, but not usually)
It’s refreshing to see an occasional couple who point out the positives, but they’re rare.
One of the ones that got me was the young couple who absolutely HAD to be in this specific neighborhood. AND their budget was unrealistic.
Two places in neighborhood. Too small, too this, too that.
One place TWO FREAKING BLOCKS outside their desired neighborhood, with everything they could possibly want, within their budget. Nope, can’t buy that one, it’s not in Hastobethis Neighborhood. :rolleyes:
In the end they didn’t buy anything and said they’d just keep looking until they found the perfect place in that neighborhood.
And oh yeah, the people who complain about paint. Ugh. I really enjoy it when the real estate agent points out that paint is cheap. Bonus points for being pleasant but snarky about it.
Yes, the HGTV show is, umm, show biz. There’s a TWOP board that goes into great detail; with a few people still “shocked” that what we see isn’t always the full story. The International homes are pretty interesting & there are some US homebuyers who don’t make me all stabby.
