Ok, grab a beer. What am I drinking? Sierra Nevada Celebration. It’s ok, I guess. Probably a growler of something from Triumph in Princeton would be better but what the heck.
Anyways, I was watching something called Property Brothers on the HGTV site tonight. Have you ever seen it? This is the kind of mindless drivel I like to watch before I go to bed. There’s nothing deep about it. And yet….
So the concept of this show is that you get a married couple (somewhere in Canada) who want to move out of their (perfectly adequate, by my standards) little digs where each of their rugrats doesn’t have his or her own room to some kind of palatial McMansion. And for some strange reason, this youngish couple has something like $700K to spend on their new Taj. These two tall dudes with perfect physiques and too many teeth take them to what they consider to be a perfect house for them. It’s gorgeous, in their humble opinion. It’s got a modern kitchen and a pool and a master suite to end all master suites with a multilevel 26 showerheaded steam cabinet and a Titanic sized soaking tub that fills itself from a faucet in the ceiling and chromo therapy. It looks like a spa in Tucson meets the Bellagio in Vegas minus the Cirque de Soleil high hoop acrobats.
And the Smiths fall in love. “Look, honey”, she coos, “I could have my office here”, about a room that is already set up as an office.
Then, the two toothy dudes hit them with L’addition. It’s usually two times their budget and they get all offended and huffy and the wife says to the camera once toothy guys are out of earshot, “I don’t even know why they brought us here. CLEARLY, this is way over our budget”. Harummmmph, resentful look at the cameraman.
Then the dudes take them to some real fixer uppers. You know, the kind where the grunge still lingers in the bathroom tile (note to self: clean bathroom tile tomorrow morning) and there is an inch of carbonized material in the oven (and start the self-cleaning cycle) and the carpet in the family room has pee stains from some animal or small human. And the dudes tell them, “Remember that house you really, really liked but couldn’t afford? Well, we can fix this one up for you!”.
And then this couple walk around the house that even *I* can see needs some new carpeting, a new paint job and a Smallbone kitchen and all they keep saying is stuff like, “I can’t live with that 70’s mirror” or “That color paint is hideous”.
At this point, I want to smack them, smack them very, very hard for being completely unable to imaginate anything other than what they see before them. It makes me so mad when people are unable to envision even the teensiest things. I want to throw something at the display and scream, “What’s WRONG with you people?? When it’s your house, you can do whatever you want with it. Don’t like the baby diarrhea colored carpets? CHANGE them!”
But they never hear me.
And then there is this obsession with privacy. Is that a code word for something. When the toothy dudes show them the backyard and say, “There is no one in the back of this lot, you have complete privacy”, are they really saying, “The minute the kids are asleep, you and the yoga instructor from the fitness center around the corner can have a threesome in the pool and no one will see you” or “You can do as many tokes over the line as you want.” Because, you know, I do not have a lack of imagination and when those toothy guys are extolling the virtues of privacy, I try to picture that mousy looking couple doin’ it in the deep end.
Oh,wait. Did I say that out loud?
Well, anyways, is it just me?
Filed under: General | Tagged: imponderables, Property brothers, Sierra Nevada Celebrationa ale | 13 Comments »