Home Repair Quackery
Bogus Home Improvement Shows
By Daniel Muniz

When the “home improvement” reality TV show craze began, I had to admit that I was hooked, especially with the series Trading Spaces. I thoroughly enjoyed discovering tips in doing home repair and I wanted to learn as much as possible about home improvement and in what I could do to save money.

The similar shows of a previous generation were dry and bland and lacked the kind of flair that would make them entertaining to watch. And that is the niche where the “home improvement” reality show craze fit in quite nicely with millions of homeowners.

However, it didn’t take long for these types of home improvement reality shows to lose their authenticity with me.
 

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More often than not, they ended up looking like all the other “reality shows” with young voluptuous women wearing tight midriffs, halters, and tank tops that exposed lots of cleavage and belly buttons. Sometimes, the female experts would wear tight pants or flashy outfits that were more suited for a bar or a nightclub instead of a construction site.

The men looked just as out of place wearing their Dockers and other “cool” looking slacks and oxfords. And just like their female counterparts, most of their clothes looked like they had more to do with strutting down a fashion runway instead of sweating at a construction site. And when they weren’t wearing shirts, their chests were way too buff to look anything like the men who actually do home improvement for a living.

The last bit of realism and believability the shows ever had quickly evaporated when I saw this one episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition that had three vivacious blondes tearing down drywall. The blondes were absolutely gorgeous and they had plenty of cleavage flopping around when they were swinging their hammers but they just looked too unreal and out of place for being in the construction business.

Perhaps the last nail in the coffin for me was seeing so many “white people” at a work site. By looking at these shows, you would almost think that nearly everyone involved in construction and home improvement was white.

Overall, the so-called experts began to look like models instead of home improvement professionals.

After I had become disillusioned about how this craze had become a spectacle, I asked a few people who are in the home repair and construction business about whether or not they felt that these home improvement reality shows are more fake than real. Below are a few of their interesting insights:
 

I totally agree with this. You know most of these people have never held a hammer other than to maybe hang a picture.

I’ve been in the construction business for 36 years. Never have I seen anyone on site that looks like these people on the shows. In the first place, if one of those midriff showing hotties came on the site, you would first hear the whump-whump of hammers hitting thumbs [and] then the air would turn blue. I would consider someone dressed like that a hazard for my people. How can they concentrate on what they are doing if they are gawking at some chickie's belly button?

I have been in commercial and residential construction for 20+ years from beginning as a simple carpenter to my present position with a construction company as a project manager / general site superintendent. If people from most of these home shows were to dress and work in the "real" construction world two things would happen: a) They would be out of business within a couple of years from the huge OSHA fines for improper work/dress violations. b) For those of us with a "builder's eye" that can see how really bad their work really is they would spend "years" on the punch list items trying to pacify the homeowner! The most disappointing part of all these shows, for me, is the fact that it sets up the average homeowner into thinking that they can just "blow" through a home project and it will turn out perfectly, then it looks like the "In a Fix" show. But for most folks that crew never shows up to clean up the mess.

I have personally known people who truly thought that as amateurs they could easily breeze through tough home improvement jobs and have everything look like the way a professional did it. Unfortunately, some of my acquaintances were sadly disappointed when things didn’t come out even close as in the reality shows.

And I have to admit that I too have fallen into a few traps myself, especially in landscaping and painting. It is a lot of hard work and very time consuming, especially if you want to do it right.

In essence, these types of TV shows do give a false sense of confidence in a field of work that requires quite a bit of expertise and a lot of experience. As a result, I have come to see them more as a form of entertainment instead of a way of learning more about home repair.

And being curious, I asked that general site superintendent if he ever had any gorgeous blonde triplets with tight tops revealing plenty of cleavage and belly buttons that ever showed up at any of his construction sites to do work. His response was:
 

Yeah... and then the alarm clock went off!

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