danemodsandy
Well-known member
I have recently been watching a lot of HGTV, something I never did before, and I find a lot of it entertaining, if a little too focused on the trendy.
But one show leaves me with my jaw on the floor more often than not - Love It or List It - and the reason is design doyenne Hilary Farr.
Time and time and time again, I have watched this woman create a design that is supposed to fix all the issues with someone's house, so that they'll stay in it instead of listing it and moving, only to have her construction crew find some horror issue that makes full execution of her plan impossible.
I've seen one house where the basement didn't get redone because Hilary decreed a design with no support posts, which would have required a huge steel beam that would have eaten something like half the budget. The support post she wanted to get rid of wasn't that big, nor that obtrusive. The homeowner only got his upstairs done as a result.
In another instance, the homeowners wanted their freezing-cold upstairs rendered habitable, their main floor converted to open-plan and their basement converted to studio space for art projects. Hilary's crew started demolition, and found that there were roof/ceiling joist issues upstairs costing a lot of money to correct. The homeowners got two rooms upstairs done, and that was IT - they had to do without everything else they'd asked for. To be fair to Hilary, their budget was small, but they got so little of what they wanted, they listed the house.
The corker came when I saw an episode where the woman said she wanted a bigger bathroom. Hilary gave her one, all right - the homeowner found that one of her bedrooms was disappearing entirely to expand the bath. The homeowner quite rightly pitched a titanic hissy fit, and Hilary was forced to redraft her plans to reinstate the third bedroom, something that must have bothered her tremendously, since she described the rebuilt bedroom as "poky" about 562 times in the remainder of the episode.
I have seen homeowners get into shouting matches with Hilary, call her integrity into question and declare on-camera that they wish to God they'd never let her touch their house.
What gives here? Doesn't the idea of a preliminary structural inspection before the design phase occur to anyone? Why is this woman given access to people's homes and bank accounts without being held accountable for the result? As it is, she spends a lot of time declaring that she's not responsible for what her crew finds, but many issues are ones that a capable inspector would turn up readily.
I'm looking forward to the day someone takes this dreadful woman and HGTV to court, frankly.
But one show leaves me with my jaw on the floor more often than not - Love It or List It - and the reason is design doyenne Hilary Farr.
Time and time and time again, I have watched this woman create a design that is supposed to fix all the issues with someone's house, so that they'll stay in it instead of listing it and moving, only to have her construction crew find some horror issue that makes full execution of her plan impossible.
I've seen one house where the basement didn't get redone because Hilary decreed a design with no support posts, which would have required a huge steel beam that would have eaten something like half the budget. The support post she wanted to get rid of wasn't that big, nor that obtrusive. The homeowner only got his upstairs done as a result.
In another instance, the homeowners wanted their freezing-cold upstairs rendered habitable, their main floor converted to open-plan and their basement converted to studio space for art projects. Hilary's crew started demolition, and found that there were roof/ceiling joist issues upstairs costing a lot of money to correct. The homeowners got two rooms upstairs done, and that was IT - they had to do without everything else they'd asked for. To be fair to Hilary, their budget was small, but they got so little of what they wanted, they listed the house.
The corker came when I saw an episode where the woman said she wanted a bigger bathroom. Hilary gave her one, all right - the homeowner found that one of her bedrooms was disappearing entirely to expand the bath. The homeowner quite rightly pitched a titanic hissy fit, and Hilary was forced to redraft her plans to reinstate the third bedroom, something that must have bothered her tremendously, since she described the rebuilt bedroom as "poky" about 562 times in the remainder of the episode.
I have seen homeowners get into shouting matches with Hilary, call her integrity into question and declare on-camera that they wish to God they'd never let her touch their house.
What gives here? Doesn't the idea of a preliminary structural inspection before the design phase occur to anyone? Why is this woman given access to people's homes and bank accounts without being held accountable for the result? As it is, she spends a lot of time declaring that she's not responsible for what her crew finds, but many issues are ones that a capable inspector would turn up readily.
I'm looking forward to the day someone takes this dreadful woman and HGTV to court, frankly.
