bang_for_your_buck

A couple of weeks ago, a scout from High Noon Productions, the people who bring you HGTV’s Bang For Your Buck, contacted me to see if I had any clients who might be interested in appearing on the show.  They were looking for kitchen/great room remodeling projects that were completed within the past three years.  So I emailed a bunch of peeps to see if we had any takers, and voilà! my girl Kimberly took the bait.

If you’re unfamiliar with Bang For Your Buck, each episode is set in one city and features three remodeling projects of a similar room and a similar budget.  Then they bring in an HGTV designer and a local real estate expert to critique the three projects, deciding which homeowners got the most return on their investment.

Muuuuch excitement around Room Fu headquarters (headquarters = home office) when the scout responded to the initial pics I sent of Kimberly’s & hubby Patrick’s kitchen and said it “looked awesome and would be great for the show!”  Woo-hoo!

So there I am, mentally doing a fast forward…because even though I’ve descended from a poultry farmer, I habitually count my chickens before they hatch.  I’m hand-delivering cookie baskets to my homeowners, the realtor, and whichever HGTV personality they’ve sent in to critique the three rooms.  I’m laughing at Kimberly saying something snarky, and laughing at (with?) Patrick, who will undoubtedly rather have a root canal than appear on national TV, but he’s going along because he’s a sweetheart.  I’m inviting everyone over to Chez Callan for a home-cooked dinner, even though on my best cooking day, the most we Callans can hope for is some baked ziti and garlic bread.  Or maybe I’ll hire my chef client to do something fabulous.  Can I afford it?  Surely, with Dan’s talent, he can whip something up that won’t drain Phoebe’s college savings, right?  Fast-forward again to the viewing party and “As Seen on HGTV” getting slapped all over my dang Web site.

But such is not the case.  Our price point turned out to be too low.

Which is mind-blowing, because it wasn’t a piddly amount of money.  They couldn’t find anyone else in Austin producing kitchen/great room makeovers as low as yours truly.

I was all, why do they always show these sky-high budgets that make the rest of us feel like schmos?  The last episode I saw that aired from Austin featured outdoor remodeling projects with budgets of $95,000.  Well, great for those people–and I can appreciate a certain amount of fantasy on my teevee–but I’m never in a million years going to be able to afford something like that, and neither are the majority of my clients.  So if the point is educating the public about ways to get the most out of their remodeling dollar, the people watching who proportionally need the most ROI are not going to walk away with much useful information if all they see are materials and design features they cannot afford.  This seems especially out-of-touch when the economy is supposed to be in the you-know-what-er.

The silver lining is that I feel like a million bucks.  No one else in Austin could turn out an affordable kitchen/great room like Room Fu?  Thank you, HGTV, for proving my mission statement!