Show Time

Before

You would think that being on maternity leave I would have all the time in the world to update my blog.

Doesn't exactly work like that.

In fact, I've been burning to post these pictures of our most dramatic makeover of all for a long time. Now that I'm about to return to work, I'm forcing myself to take advantage of Poppy's naptime to do something other than pick up toys.

Hard to believe it has been almost a year since I first spoke to the folks at the shoe "Desperate Spaces" on HGTV. I came across their casting solicitation on Craigslist while perusing the TV listings. We have some friends who have done well renting their house out for shoots, and I figured some producer somewhere must be trying to find a house that looked like a crack den to use in his/her production. Among the ads was one that said "Do you have a room in your house that is so bad it makes you feel DESPERATE?" And I thought to myself, take your pick. You could do a whole series on the rooms in my house that make me feel that way. So I answered the ad, and after a lovely visit from segment director Art, Jim and I found ourselves — and our office — accepted to the show. Within months our space would be getting a TV-style makeover.

I don't want to bore you with too many details, but here are a few that most people want to know when they hear we were part of a TV makeover. The show took 4 months to plan, but only 2 days to shoot — that's a full-blown makeover in two days. The budget for the room was supposed to be $2500, but we feel we got much more than that out of it. We were not only pleased with the result, we felt the whole process was very smooth and we had a good time doing it. The whole production team was very respectful of our home, and the designers went to great lengths to accomodate our desires. While we did not have a say in the final design, we were able to tell them about things we liked and disliked and challenges we were facing in desiging the room. They really came up with some interesting solutions. The production was pretty grand and made quite a spectacle of our house for those two days. For instance, here's how the front of our house looked during the shoot:

During

You'll find the "after" pictures below (remember, you can click on any image on this blog to see a much, much larger version of it), but here are just a couple things of note that they did: They took out the whole fireplace. That was huge. It wasn't a working fireplace, although there is a full-blown chimney on the other side of the wall. We think it probably got damaged in some long-ago earthquake, so they just sealed it up. It was a hideous hangover from the 60s, so good riddance. Here is a picture of the fireplace in process:

During

You'll also notice a brick wall in the "Before" Picture above (at the top of this post). That was not actually brick, but a faux brick — I don't even know what to call it — it was just faux brick that was hung on the wall. If you knocked on it, it actually rang hollow. Taking that out was one of the first things we did. You'll notice that the show replaced the 7 mis-matched bedposts that served as a stair railing with something much more cool and modern. And they hung a very heavy bookcase on the wall above our cold air return, making a wall that had previously been somewhat unusable (because you can't block a cold air return) suddenly usable again.

OK, 'nuff said. Let's get to looking at the after shots.

After

Just want to give a special thanks to the whole staff and crew of Desperate Spaces. The house really felt like it turned a corner after this re-do, and we are very appreciative. You can view just a tad more about this makeover on the HGTV Web site at http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/shows_hdesp/episode/0,3183,HGTV_30737_59868,00.html.