HGTV Ruined My Life

My wife is addicted to ALL of the shows on HGTV; every single one of them. After getting married, my DVR went from being filled with shows like Rescue Me, LOST, Fringe, and the occasional sports documentary or History Channel special I found interesting, to being filled with shows like House Hunters, Color Splash, My First Place, and the latest, Design Star. Each of the HGTV shows is a variation of either buying a new house or condo, or renovating a current space. Luckily, my wife is extremely settled in our place and never wants to move or change a thing about the way our house looks. (Insert THICK sarcasm here.)

Probably at least once a week I hear about how we need to paint the walls, rearrange furniture, or tear down a wall in our two bedroom condo to open the kitchen to the living room. Most of the time we go for a long walk with June and talk about all the reason we should or shouldn’t do any of these things and by the time we are back home (plus or minus an evening of me pushing the sofa to various areas of our 15 foot living room) we realize that we have things pretty well figured out and changes aren’t necessary right now. We should probably just wait until we purchase our next home and then we can do all the things we’ve wanted to do to a house.

Yesterday we hung out with my folks for the afternoon. We went with them to their new house and gave them our input on some of the decisions they are making in their new house. Then Gigi and I walked through a few of the model homes and talked about what we want in our next place and then we went to Room and Board in Costa Mesa to look at a few of the furniture pieces they were planning on putting in their house. It’s official; my life has turned into every show on HGTV.

After we got home last night we kept looking at the Room and Board catalog dreaming of stuff we could do to our house. Then we watched not one, but two episodes of Design Star. The final words my wife said to me before she turned over and went to sleep were, “I think we should use the Rothko painting in the dining room as inspiration for the rest of that space.” I am pretty sure that I had dreams of designing houses last night. This morning I can’t stop thinking of different ideas that we can do to our living room/dining room areas. Crap, I’m getting into this. Luckily there will probably be a few new tools involved.

It’s a good thing we both like DIY projects and enjoy spending time together, otherwise this could get ugly. Thank you HGTV for making me constantly insecure about the way my house looks and giving me a man-crush on David Bromstad, you have officially ruined my life.