Re: Home Improvement TV Shows

On Sat, 04 Aug 2007 06:20:05 -0500, jj60204 wrote:

These home improvement TV shows are so useless, and tend to piss me off.
Almost everything I own I built, and built it using recycled lumber, and
other building materials. Then I see these shows on tv. It seems that
their main goal is to waste as many materials as possible, wreck as much
as they can, and then use the most expensive materials that can be bought.
They act as is resources are unlimited and every home owner has unlimited
money to spend. First, they start with a nice looking smaller home, that
I'd die to own. Then they pretty much destroy the place, being sure to
waste and wreck as much as they can. They bring in huge dumpsters to
dispose of perfectly good, used lumber. They toss out metal items that
could be sold to a recycler and/or reused. They take older but well made
cabinets and rather than remove a few screws or nails from the wall, so
someone else can enjoy these used cabinets, they bust the hell out of them
with sledge hammers and sawsalls, and toss them all in the dumpster.
Finally they start to rebuild. They make the small house into a hube
mansion that only a politician could afford to heat and keep clean, and
they cant put in a common formica cabinet, but have to use imported and
expensive marble, and install multi-thousand dollar sinks, and spend a
fortune on everything.

I dont know about you, but I am perfectly happy with my formica counter
top, recycled stainless sink, and my $50 Moen faucet. My vinyl floor
tiles are just fine, and my electrical switches and outlets are common
ivory colored and dont cost $50 each because they are ultra fancy. After
all, most of them are hidden behind furniture anyhow. To me, fancy is
putting up a little wallpaper instead of painting, and yah, I did spend a
few extra bucks to get some extra fancy trim in my living room, but didn't
go into debt for the rest of my life to do it.

Heck, it's a house. I sleep there, eat there, and most of the rest of my
life is spent either working or socializing outside my home. Everyone
needs a roof over their head, and caves are sort of outdated and hard to
find. We dont need to live in caves, but then there are the other
extremes. Why do most people need such huge homes and why do they go into
debt for life to build them, when that debt means they will have to spend
more time on the job and less time in that house. It just dont make sense.
Of course, most people dont live or build places like that, but there are
some that do. Yet, if you watch these Home Improvement shows, you'd thing
everyone needs to own a 40 room home at a cost of 5.5 million dollars.
And of course, to build them, we must waste and wreck as much as we can,
so that those who could use them, will never get them. Yah, it's just TV,
but it still pisses me off.

Im with you all the way.

I dont have as much experience with homes as we just bought ours last
august. But I have learned alot and I didnt learn any of it from watching
these shows.

You know they dont even consider that when they get done with the house
the cost of doing it puts the house out of the price range of others in
the neighborhood. How will they sell and recoup any of the money they
spend when other homes are valued way below what they spent on the remodel
plus the origional value of the house???

Some of these shows even use crap material and poor installation
techniques. The "Improvements" they made will probably last only 5 years
tops and then it will have to be regutted and rebuilt. I bet the next
owner uses formica when they do!

I know property values are different in the west but Im never gonna pay
400,000 bucks for a 1200 square foot house!

What I really laugh about is when they buy a place and never even spend
the 500 bucks to have a home inspection. They would rather save the 500
and spend 10,000 later when they find out about rotten wood or termites!

These shows are truly crap and for the totally clueless.

coffee

--
coffee
Linux Registered User #449534


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