HGTV Manipulated Expectations For DIY Projects (Don't Let It Happen To You)

If you stood quietly in the corner and watched a construction crew renovate, say, an outdated kitchen, I doubt you'd walk away with the impression that you could knock out a similar project the following week. You probably wouldn't know what was happening half the time. But it's too easy to see that same process in an hour-long compressed and sanitized HGTV show and think, "That's something I could manage. Let's order some lumber!" Getting in over your head is a state that follows overconfidence as surely as the big reveal follows a commercial break. And there's no better way to overstock your confidence reserves than watching home renovation shows.

When my wife and I started building our house in 2020, we took a step that seemed to address some new pandemic-era economic realities. We would have no debt and no mortgage payments. We would be able to get by with a much lower income. And I no longer had a job, so there was time for learning and building. It all seemed very concrete and sensible. But the decision was informed by a lack of information that wasn't helped by watching an endless stream of home renovation programming built around easily resolved drama, propped up by a swarm of (often unseen) labor.

Without real budgets to ground them, HGTV projects can expand into huge (and hugely time-consuming) monstrosities that aren't tenable in the real world of retail materials, day jobs, and increasingly edgy spouses. The projects tend to spread their effects into other areas: changes to the home's underlying structure, near-permanent adjustments to everyday household budgets, and the need for gut-wrenching tradeoffs. So please, do yourself a favor: don't let HGTV manipulate your expectations for DIY projects.

Experience is the most valuable asset in the world of construction, without which building theory and the best tools are useless. Experience is how you instinctively avoid some problems (because you've dealt with them before, probably numerous times). It's how you resolve other problems efficiently. Experience comes with a mental catalog of alternatives, emergency measures that can save your neck (or your house, or your marriage). These are fallback positions, or pressure-release valves for over-compressed budgets and timeframes.

Inexperience, on the other hand, can leave you where homeowners Russ and Kara Overman found themselves in an episode of "Rico to the Rescue." After a disastrous attempt at working with "a guy named Shane" to finish their basement, the Overmans brought in an HGTV expert, Rico Leon, who in turn brought in a general contractor named Poonam. That's at least three layers of experience on top of the actual labor, fighting to get a job done on time and on budget, and giving legal advice to boot. How much of that structure and oversight do you really have the experience to take on yourself?

Obviously, skill is important to the construction and renovation of a home, but design skills are critical, too. When you see an apparently effortless design spun by an HGTV host, don't assume it's something you or your partner can do well without experience. In addition to aesthetic chops, a good interior designer is part architect and part builder, and understands far more about building and renovations than you'd guess.

Even insiders acknowledge that homeowners (and viewers) are insulated from reality during an HGTV renovation. Rachel Whyte, who was a Magnolia photographer during "Fixer Upper" Seasons 2 and 3, had her new Waco home renovated by the Gaineses. While she was happy with the outcome and the relatively surprise-free process, she points out that she had little input in the process and that some of the results changed the moment the staged furnishings were driven away. In fact, Whyte told Country Living that she only met with Joanna Gaines twice during the remodel — on "real estate day" and during the design meeting. Beyond that and a few texts and calls, the couple was basically isolated from the work going on in their new home.

The biggest problem in the episode was the rejiggering of an island that didn't seem to be working in the available space, and the solution was apparently worked out (on a board, which was then stuffed into Chip's shirt) with no input from the Whytes. Needless to say, this is not how work progresses in normal, camera-free life. Questions, changes, and additions always come up, and it's not always a smooth process to work out the details of choices and budgets with contractors. 

Of course, some things need doing right, and some things don't need doing at all. In the throes of planning your masterful DIY remodel, or at least mine, there will be many opportunities to reject this project or that. You probably won't take many of these opportunities, but you should. One of the dirty little secrets hidden from HGTV viewers is that you don't have to do everything possible when remodeling your home. Though they try to hide it, HGTV renovation shows don't remodel every room, as we learned when "Home Town" couple Erin and Ben Napier revealed they left the living room out of the episode featuring their country home because it simply didn't need to be done.

In most HGTV renovations, they try to hide these skipped rooms from you because it takes away from the cultivated drama about schedules and budgets. The picture painted is, once again, not reality. But here's the thing: They should leave rooms out, and so should you. If your goal is to do the impossible, you're setting yourself up for inevitable failure.

"This Old House" had a "sweat equity" component by which the homeowners were expected to participate in their home's renovation. There's something comfortably parental about it: If you're going to reap the rewards, you must do some of the work. This treatment of the DIY impulse was a progenitor of HGTV homeowners awkwardly swinging sledgehammers on demolition day, except that "This Old House" might spend an hour teaching you which sledgehammer to use and how to use it less awkwardly. And, importantly, it made no effort to disguise the fact that some work was better left to professionals.

Of course, it's not a lack of willingness to invest sweat equity that gets most DIYers in trouble; it's an overabundance of willingness. We learn from the fast pace and sanitized outcomes of HGTV that we should be able to pull off whatever we set out to do. And that might even be true, but we won't be working alone, and it won't be done by the next commercial break. 

Ultimately, it's up to us to keep tabs on our own overconfidence. Are you really going to invest tens of thousands of dollars on something you "learned" from a show about a random couple seeking a new house, or a home remodel dreamt up by Lil' John? It's worth a moment to reconsider.