Her first name is Mindy, so her real name is Mindy Paige Davis Page.
She got married on TLC’s “A Wedding Story” and her hubby kept calling her Mindy. I guess calling her Paige would be like calling her “Smith” or “Anderson” or some other last name.
On the TWoP site, they refer to her as MPDP. 
she didn’t keep her maiden name; she is: mindy paige davis page. she just uses the middle bits.
one of the reasons i like changing rooms over trading spaces is that the homeowners aren’t afraid to call crap, crap! of course with some sort of uk accent. you will hear some one say, " it’s horrid!" or “it’s awful!” much more real.
bibliocat, every time i see her initials (mpdp), i think mippy dippy.
But of course with that British accent, “It’s horrid!” or “It’s crap!” just sounds so much nicer. 
Who gets Changing Rooms here in the States? I don’t. I think I would if I shelled out for digital cable, but I can’t do that right now. Is it on the BBC Channel?
Oh, and I think “Mippy Dippy”, too. 
I don’t watch this show much, but, gawd, I remember that one! Not only was it ugly (becuase it was way too busy - a few flowers would have looked alot better, IMHO) but I kept thinking - “how in god’s name are they going to CLEAN those?” Next to the kitchen, the bathroom is the dirtiest in the house. All that steam, hair, not to mention all the skin cells making dust each time you dry off after your shower, beard stubble flying…etc. etc. But how in the world could they remove it? They’d have to then SPACKLE THE ENTIRE WALL to get rid of 12,000 holes!
It wouldn’t even be worth spackling… the walls were pretty much ruined. They’d need to be taken down and redone. Bathrooms use a type of drywall called greenboard. It’s water-resistant, provided you don’t staple 6,000 flowers into it. You can use drywall nails to get it up, of course, and then use joint tape and spackle over them, and then paint, but a designer should know better than to freaking make thousands of little holes like that in a bathroom.
Cleaning it was what I was thinking of…the dust, steam, hairspray, deodorant, etc. What a nightmare. You couldn’t use a feather duster or even try to vacuum them. I swear Hildi doesn’t think beyond the reveal.
Those HOs were friends of Laurie’s and used that friendship to get on the show, and to get a bathroom makeover, an TS first. They never do bathrooms.
And there was nothing wrong with that bathroom in the first place, anyway. It was beautiful!
I liked how she did the flowers on the curtains. If she had done rows of the flowers on strips of wood around the edges of the room, like a 3-D border, it would have been better. Same effect, but less damage.
changing room is on bbc america in the states. sometimes i house/cat sit for friends who have digital cable. the cats are convinced i’m british.
my fav. thing said the last time i watched was: “here is your paint kettle, this one is your kettle, i’ll be back in a ticky boo with a kettle for me.”
No, families. It won’t be just tweens, but a set of parents with an older child. I get the impression that they’ll be rotating the carpenters, but I really don’t know. I just hope they don’t rotate the host. (The new one is a guy.)
I caught a couple episodes of Changing Rooms when TLC aired a whole bunch last Thanksgiving. I really wanted to watch them but could only get a cursory viewing of a couple. I was unimpressed. I’ve read rave reviews of the host, as well, but apart from her amazing accent, she really came off as a dud. Nothing the TS crew has done has matched the horror that I saw on CR when some block-head designer painted a 600 year old fireplace. I would have gutted that guy like a fish.
Plus, they nail curtain treatments right into the wall, and staple the sheers to the rod-how are you going to clean them?
There was ONE Hildi room I liked, and that was it.
Which room was that? I liked the one she did recently, where they tiled the floor and painted the walls a soft blue. She was still full of herself, though, since she created a three-panel painting and said it was an art gallery for the HOs to just sit and stare and her art all day.
There was one Frank did where he made one of those gauzy canopy things and stapled it into the ceiling (the room had a high cathedral ceiling). How screwed up is that?!? You could never take it down to wash it.
I hate the yards and yards of gauzy fabric over the beds as a faux-canopy headboard look. First of all, it looks cheesy. And second, they always just staple it right into the wall.
Not to nitpick, but each flower got 2 staples, so it was more like 24,000 holes.
Not that 12,000 is much better.
I know one HO put her foot down when Hildi wanted to use a rug shampooer to dye the carpet orange. I swear, that woman is from another world.
Yep. I saw a digitally modified photo on the web somewhere that made that room’s carpet orange and juxtaposed it with what actually happened and the one with the orange carpet looked much better. You can see it here.
Ding, ding, ding, we have a WINNAH!
Banyan has said very plainly that they want to bring more of a “risk and challenge” element into the show, it’s not just home-makeover television, it’s a game (Paige has been emphasizing that word big time in recent key exchanges) and there will be some losers. They are on record as stating that the goal is one disappointment in every ten results. (I don’t know if that means one out of ten homeowners or one out of ten shows, which would be twenty homeowners.) They are actually planning, actively, to create rooms that will cause homeowners to weep, to slam out of their houses and then come back and wrestle their friends to the floor or to say (my personal favorite TS response, ever) “This is just stupid.” (That was Doug’s home theater room.)
The rift between the trained designers (Vern, Gen, Edward, Laurie and sorta Frank) versus the artistic people who don’t have specific interior design education (Hildi, Doug, Kia and sorta Frank) is growing stronger and stronger. The former consider all of those important design issues like usability, comfort, color and the fact that the homeowners have to live with one another after the show packs up and leaves. The latter take really bold risks that can pan out but more often than not leave some element of disappointment behind. Even when homeowners like the idea or theme, they may not like the execution of it. (I say “sorta Frank” because his designs tend to be goofy, but I don’t recall a homeowner who wasn’t pleased with the results of his work in the end.) If they add another designer in the fall, I wouldn’t be one eensy weensy teeny tiny iota of a bit surprised if that person falls squarely into the Hildi-Kia camp. With 85 shows next season, they’re going to need some help in meeting that one disappointment in every ten results strategy.
I just can’t see why the homeowners agree to do some of the things that they do. I’ve seen one homeowner pair put their feet down and say “NO!” and that was the couple who refused to paint a gorgeous wood floor for Doug, something he felt was just absolutely integral to his design. The first thing the homeowner said during the reveal was “Oh, thank God! They didn’t do anything to my floor!” Crying Pam’s neighbors compromised. Jackass Jessie’s neighbors knew that she hated brown and didn’t say a word until it was absolutely, completely too late. The couple that glued the hay were so namby pamby that they couldn’t even come up with a good retort when Hildi stupidly said “Well, they’ll have to tell the children not to touch the hay.” Oy! Who are these people? Since when are Americans so obsequious and bending? Why won’t they stand up for their friends?
Personally, regardless of the contract, if I had been asked to attach 6,000 flowers, moss, hay, a mosiac of Hilde Santo-Tomas’s overinflated head to a wall, place an astroturf grave blanket on a bed, paint a bedroom stark black or “compromise” with the poor and hasty installation of a fireplace surround, I’d just refuse, outright, to do so. And I’m be more than willing to let a jury decide my fate in the breach of contract trial that followed.
In fact, I’m not even sure how the TS contract is legal. It’s not a good faith deal – it’s one thing to give up any right to sue over matters of taste, it’s another thing altogether to waive your ability to recover damages when they screw with the functional integrity or the basic safety of your home, especially when they run afoul of building and safety codes. I don’t know that you can give someone blanket consent to break the law in your home and leave you behind to face the consequences, even if it does make for “good TV.”
Um, I’m gonna stop ranting now.
On the www.televisonwithoutpity.com site, in the Trading Spaces forum, there is a thread titled “Legal/moral/ethical issues” where this question comes up quite frequently.
tlw
I’m not disagreeing with your rant, but I think you aren’t taking editing into account in some cases. I recall reading that the HO’s from the Hildi hay episode bickered with her quite a bit over her plans, but those scenes were edited out of the show, so it just looked like they were namby pamby about it.
Likewise, because of the fact that it is shot in such a way as to avoid continuity errors (i.e. everyone wearing the same outfits, etc.) we don’t know when Laurie actually found out that Jackass Jessie didn’t like brown (or who actually told her, if I recall correctly). The circumstances are never completely revealed in any of the shows.
Just my two cents.
The photoshop certainly does look better, but Hildi’s plans have a way of not working out (hello, spray painted furniture), so I’d have been awfully worried about her touching the carpet, anyway.
It was certainly the sort of process that I’d want the designer to have practiced and gotten familiar with before doing it. (It drives me nuts when a designer wants to use Trading Spaces as a laboratory for their professional experiments!)
My husband asked how Hildi could be a “successful” designer. Certainly, her rooms on TS do not do much to recommend her to private clients.
Vern, on the other hand, probably has more business than he could handle. Anyone know the name of his design firm?
Hildi lives and works in Paris, so unless her clients are able to watch TS somehow, what she does on the show doesn’t reflect back on her actual clients. :rolleyes:
And of course, there are always people who would think it’d be “neat” to have a TV celebrity do their room, no matter her reputation.
Vern, on the other hand… if I could be guaranteed of getting him, I’d sign up for the show in a heartbeat. He could have free reign in my house. It seems when the HOs say, “I think the room needs this and maybe if it had that, and I’d love to see it painted this color…”, then that’s what he does. He really listens to what they want. And what he does is practical. Remember the kitchen he did a couple of weeks ago, the one that started out that awful blood-red color? He covered the bench in the flooring material, because he knew the kids would be standing on it to hang their coats up. You can’t get more practical that that!
Hildi took out the china cabinet in this week’s show. Just where are they supposed to put all their china now? Her rooms may look nice for the reveal, but they’re just not practical for real life.
Well, some of the show is scripted, remember. I think the HO’s have an idea of where the designer is going to go, and the designers don’t just show up look at the room, and run off to Lowe’s after consulting with the HO’s. They see the room, 2 weeks ahead of time I think, and walk in with design in hand.
Case in point…the Crying Pam episode. Doug played it up like it was a big shock to him that the HO’s didn’t want the fireplace painted, but lo and behold…he amazingly had enough lumber to create the surround. I don’t think that’s something you can change at the last minute.