Hunting for House Meat

It’s astounding to me the popularity of the show “House Hunters” on HGTV.  I started watching it when we first got married and we were thinking about buying a house.  Now, 5 years later, it’s still on, multiple times a day, and they have a spin-off “House Hunters International”.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, it follows a couple/family/individual looking to purchase a property, most often for the first time.  They showcase 3 properties, all the while getting the thoughts of the hopeful buyers and the perspective of the seasoned realtor.  At the end of the show, the buyer chooses a property and then they do a “1 month later” segment at the end to show everyone how they’ve made it their own.

Mel and I started watching the show because we were looking for a house and wanted to see more about the process.  When we bought our house 4 years ago, we stopped watching, because there was nothing else to learn.  However, we found ourselves gravitating towards it when nothing else was on, and I started discovering the real reason for watching the show: to criticize the buyers.

Since most of the buyers were first-timers, it’s pretty funny how wildly optimistic they are about the properties they can get for their crap budgets.  Some of them have these weird particularities that they cannot live with/without.  Sometimes their desires are contradictory.

• “I absolutely cannot live with white kitchen cabinets!”
• “I have to live next to a golf course.”
• “I want a house that’s in the city, with a huge yard and balconies, with a beach view in a great neighborhood.  I live in San Diego, and my budget is 150K.  I found $2.64 behind my dresser, if that helps.”

Sometimes we get an episode where the fragility of the relationship is exposed.  Husband and wife openly bicker in each property, almost coming to blows. You wonder if they should even be together, let alone buying a property together.

My absolute least favorite episodes are the ones where it’s some young couple that’s 3 months married and not planning on kids for 30 years and they’re looking at these monstrous houses with 4,000 or 5,000 square feet.  What on earth are they going to do with that space?  Are they planning on inviting herds of homeless people to come live in it with them?  Our home is 1800 square feet, and we moved into it when we had no kids.  There are 3 bedrooms, and it just felt like a huge waste, because we just chucked stuff into one of the bedrooms, and the other we chucked stuff in it but also the desk, so it was the “office”.  We only got use out of it when someone came to visit, but otherwise it just sat there.  I felt bad having so much space, after years of enduring lectures about not wasting and letting things “fulfill the measure of their creation”.  I almost invited a homeless guy with a heroin problem to come crash at our place, and maybe please just this once not steal anything.  Of course, once we had kids, those rooms fulfilled the measure of their creation real quick-like.

Anyway, these couples have ridiculous budgets which make me wonder where on earth they are getting all that money from, and the houses they visit are just awesome.  3 or more car garages, stone exteriors, nice interiors, huge kitchens, and plenty of space to chase your kid around in.  A place big enough that you can leave your measuring tape at home when you go to Target.  Plenty of space for a Hansen family reunion.  Ha!  Just kidding.  That’s not possible.

So these couples visit these places and point out the dumbest flaws.

• “The master suite has too many windows.”
• “I would prefer more of a eggshell white than a rat dropping white for the bathroom.”
• “I don’t get a ‘homey’ vibe here-it’s too big.” (but then they choose the biggest house of the 3)

I could go on a long tangent of “this is what’s wrong with our country today”, but I’ll spare you.  For now.
My favorite episodes, besides the couples on the verge of divorce, are the ones where we suspect that the family is Mormon, so we spend the whole episode looking for clues.  Is that a CTR ring?  Did I see a temple picture on the wall?  Did they just call the realtor “Brother”?  Are those sleeves long enough for garments?” Most of the time it turns out they’re not Mormon, or they’re sinning like crazy, whatever, but when we’re right it’s like winning at “Clue”.

Like everybody else who watches, we try to guess which property the buyers choose in the end.  I take a few factors into consideration, like how much “character” they want, how inflexible they are about location, and how much they like/hate dinner parties.  I don’t want to brag or anything, but I’m wrong just about every time.

The reveal at the end is my favorite part of the show.  When the buyers are touring their prospective houses, they mention all of these things that they couldn’t ever live with, like a pink bathroom or brass fixtures or carpet in the bedroom.  Then of course in the reveal, they’ve changed maybe one of those things and just bought a bunch of new furniture.  To be fair, they only have a couple of weeks to make changes.

I wish they would have follow up episodes a couple years down the road and check in on the buyers.  What changes did they make?  Which percentage of the couples stayed married?  Which houses got foreclosed on?  I would at least like a rating of how much they regretted their decision to go with the “fixer-upper” instead of the “move-in ready”.  This is how I imagine the follow-up episodes would go:

• “Oh yeah, this place is a freaking dump.  We bought it 2 years ago because my wife insisted on a house with ‘character’ and now we have amassed 30K in home equity loans and the house still smells like old people.”
• “We had to sell our 4,500 square foot monster because we realized we were only 2 people and all of our stuff fits in two rooms.  We lost 50K after all was said and done.  My arms are still sore from all that vacuuming.”
• “Oh, her?  That’s not my wife.  We divorced after 2 months of arguing about brushed nickel versus chrome hardware.  This is my new girlfriend, Charly.  I met her in a…let’s say chat room.”
• “And here’s the master bathroom.  You may remember from the original airing of our episode that the walls were pink and the fixtures were all brass, which we hated.  Well, it’s exactly the same.  My lazy husband hasn’t done anything but watch sports and shed body hair everywhere.”

The real moral of the story is that Mel and I grow much closer together with each episode.  Maybe it’s because we appreciate each other’s reason and feel good about our own house.  Or maybe because we look down on everybody with a false sense of superiority.