Ex-Home Makeover Show Participants Exposed The Grim Reality Of Life After The Cameras Turned Off

Home makeover shows. Who doesn’t love them? From Fixer Upper and Property Brothers to Extreme Makeover, we all love to watch ordinary folk have their homes renovated. But what we see on screen seems to be somewhat different from the reality faced by participants after the film crew has packed up and left. Here are 20 shocking stories from ex-participants...

Are they quality builds?

Reddit user akumamatata8080 asked, “People who’ve been on home renovation shows, how’s the house holding up?” And there rapidly followed a glut of responses. One reply was from a user named DryProperty. “I work for one of the construction companies that was contracted to build the new house on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” they wrote. “This was, like, ten-plus years ago when the show was at the height of its popularity.”

Too expensive to maintain

DryProperty continued, “Anyway, it was a huge, nice house built for a widowed mother with several kids (father had recently died, hence why she was on the show). [But] even though the house was ‘given’ to her, she couldn’t afford it after a year or so – property tax, electricity, water, upkeep, etc – and put it on the market. Simply owning a home of that size is very expensive and she couldn’t afford it.” Oh no.

PA revealed many cut corners

Another to respond to the Reddit thread was user onetaketammy. “In the early 2000s I worked on a few episodes of Trading Spaces as a production assistant,” they wrote. “In one house we did a kitchen that featured a backsplash made of broken glass. The grout did not fully fill the cracks so this family with small children literally had shards of glass with sharp edges on the walls! We also spray-painted a dishwasher black and it started chipping off almost immediately but they framed it so it looked nice for TV and we peaced out.”

They put the tv crew to work

But onetaketammy wasn’t finished with their story. “I was a college student studying television production and they handed me a drill and told me to remove the hardware from all of the cabinets,” they wrote. “I had never touched a drill before… [or] painted entire walls of a home before but Trading Spaces changed all of that! To be fair though, the premise of the show was only having two days and a budget of $1,000 (or something around that) to complete the renovation and production did stick to that concept, so you get what you signed up for!”