Sounding off about real estate/renovation shows

I like watching real estate shows. I like them because I like design, and I like the aspect of being able to feast on the design of the interior rooms of people's homes. I like to see why people are looking for one type of home or another, or why they are building it this way and not that way.

There are three real estate shows I've been watching.

Tiny Paradise on HGTV: "Couples build tiny homes in idyllic locations."

Grand Designs on Youtube (British): "People pursue their visions and aspirations of building their own homes."

Escape to the Country on Netflix (British): "Helping prospective buyers find their dream home in the country."

In Tiny Paradise, a couple, sometimes young and starry-eyes exuberant, in other cases middle aged and wearily retiring, buy a plot of land in paradise somewhere and build a tiny house on it. Tiny houses are part of a growing movement where someone designs and dwells in a home that's less expensive to build and maintain, causes a lower impact on the land, and yet affords the person the ability to live in a beautiful area of the world, like seaside in Costa Rica or in the jungle of Mexico or in the Rocky Mountains. A 'tiny home' in America is generally considered to be less than 400 square feet. Sometimes a tiny home is on wheels and transportable, other times it has a foundation.

Then there's Grand Design. First of all, I enjoy British reality television more than American (and Australian and Canadian) because the UK reality shows are always more low key. On reality and UK/OZ/Canadian competition shows there seem to be calmer people who are more respectful, and hosts who seem truly interested in the people and the process.

In Grand Design, we follow a couple who has purchased a plot of land and plans to build a house on it. The hook is that the land and/or the house present challenges. In one episode, a young couple had saved money and bought a postage stamp sized lot in London and planned to build an eco-friendly house of three levels on it. The lot was so small it could barely hold a bucket loader, never mind room for the machine to move around and deposit its goods.

In another episode, a middle aged couple bought a dilapidated Victorian dairy in London and planned to make a home for themselves and their son within it, updating the structure and making it habitable for their modern needs, yet retaining the character and qualities of the history behind the place.

In a third episode, a New Zealand couple with several children bought a plot of land sight unseen in Britain, and planned to build a self-designed home on it. Te issue was that the land was incredibly steep (they knew this going in). They had designed a house specifically to suit the difficult challenge the steep grade that hillside dwelling presented.

In Escape to the Country, a couple who had been living the rat race life in one of Britain's cities decides to leave it all behind and escape to some part of the United Kingdom that is bucolic, rural, slower paced, and gorgeous. I mean, REALLY gorgeous. Even if you don't care for real estate shows, just looking at the beautiful parts of the UK is incredible. They also spend time teaching about the history of the locations and the industries there (tanning, horse raising, lace making. etc). So this show is beautiful and interesting.

The seekers are interested in a higher quality of life and are ready to make a big change in order to get it. The areas are so pretty if I had $300,000 I'd escape to the British countryside, too!

So those are the shows I've been watching lately. Here is my review.

People who build tiny homes are part of a movement called the Tiny House Movement. These are people who deliberately eschew large dwellings for various reasons. They want to make a limited footprint on the land. They want to live a low-impact lifestyle. They are conservatively saving money or entering an alternate lifestyle that includes a lot of barter and such. And so on.

Sadly, in several of the Tiny Paradise episodes, it turned out that the people list the house on a site like AirBnB and rent it out! This, to me, is the opposite of low impact, eco-living. It makes a mockery of all the philosophy the couple has spouted at the beginning of the show. It really ruined it for me to discover that these people claiming all this low impact living and adhering to the tiny house philosophy are just out to grab a buck from this house they had all this free help to build in the first place.

As an aside, I have been an advocate of tiny house living since 1990. I am a grandma in the tiny house movement, which is not new and wasn't started by millennials. I've lived tiny since 1990 and have experimented with small, low impact, non-consumerism lifestyle by living on in a sailboat, a small camper, and now a tiny apartment. Who fought at against zoning officials, experienced bias and prejudice, and called for the necessity of different land use ideas. So it is a personal affront to see the 'movement' taken over by people who in fact are living a high-impact, high-consumerism philosophy and call it tiny living.

The Grand Designs couples...their build is usually pushing the edge of the envelope of financial feasibility or reasonable topography, or doable size, whatever limit they've decided to try and overcome, the overwhelming feeling you get by the end is that the project has sucked all the life out of the couple. If the host asked them 'would you do it all again?' the feeling you get from watching them struggle through so many difficulties and setbacks  is that they'd respond "I'd rather slit my throat first." They've would up with a house they have come to love-hate, or a mountain of debt they owe to Dad or Brother or The Bank, or a job they gave up to be the project manager since the build overtook their whole life, or a strained marriage. Not all episodes arelike that, some feature happypeople doeing exactly whatthey wanted. But the episodes which feature soemone disheartened with DIY building are at the same time interesting and sad. 

Escape To the Country is gorgeous, as I mentioned. And the couples they choose are always low key. I'ts refreshing to see a British couple defer to one another, to discuss things politely, and to move through the house as guests and not a herd of elephants. The US couples on the real estate shows are, ahem, less polite, gentle, and deferential. The homes are absolutely lovely to look at. The host never tries to upsell the couple. In fact, he or she always seems to find a home or two that is under the couple's stated budget. So all that is good. The only thing that is difficult about watching that show is that there is never an ending. Most times, the show concludes with the couple still thinking about which house to buy. Even if there is a conclusion, the show never goes back and films what the interior looks like after the couple has made it their own. So you're sort of left hanging. It's like sticking with watching the 4 hour Academy Awards show to the end, and you get to the Best Picture category and they pull out the envelope and say "And the winner is..." and the screen goes black.

Oh well, lol, that is my take on the recent real estate home shows I've been watching. What shows do you enjoy! Which ones aggravate you? Let me know in the comments!