The Design Instinct

If your idea of a great weekend is the "Trading Spaces" marathon on TLC, or you've spent a whole morning at the Home Depot picking out supplies for a home improvement project, or you've just found yourself watching MTV reruns at 2:00 in the afternoon and wishing you could live in a Real World mansion, then maybe you know where I'm coming from.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid. I remember four different rentals before my mom and stepdad settled in a little three bedroom house in Glenside. This house came pretty cheap because it was a bit of a fixer-upper, so we spent most of the first year situating wall hangings ("Is it centered?" "A little more to the left. No, too far!"), painting walls and rearranging furniture - which was all great fun to me. And my mom took a lot of her design ideas from "Trading Spaces" on TLC. "Design on a Dime" and "Decorating Cents" on HGTV were also favorites, beause my mom loved bargain hunting, but my favorite show was "Flip This House."

On "Flip This House" a camera crew follows an intrepid person or couple as they take a house in some state of disrepair and attempt to raise its property value by making renovations - usually updating the kitchen and bathroom, throwing on a new coat of paint and landscaping the yard. At the end of the show they tally up the initial cost of the house and what they spent on renovations and compare that amount with what the house eventually sells for.

Maybe because the show usually ends happily (with the people involved selling the house, making a tidy profit and learning a lot along the way) it gives me a good feeling about house flipping and makes me think that we can do the same.

The only difference here is that once Kelli, Annie and I have finished renovating the house we have no intention of selling it and will probably live there together for a very long time. : D