October 24, 2008

• Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

  Extreme Makeover/Home Edition is building a new house in an adjacent neighborhood, so my work colleagues and I checked it out at lunch.

  We went to the site by catching a free shuttle—a white van that says School Students on the front—near a white tent in a big abandoned parking lot. The staff in the tent wanted to know if we were volunteers or gawkers. If we were volunteers, we would have received white hard hats and blue EMHE t-shirts. We got nothing. Then again, we paid nothing.

  When we arrived at the site, there were two gated areas across from work site: one for the volunteers and one for spectators. We had bleachers, but were a bit farther away than the volunteers.

  The old house was destroyed on Saturday. Today was Thursday, and the “reveal” is tomorrow. The outside of the new house is refreshingly suitable for the neighborhood. If I was driving through, it wouldn’t stand out as out-of-place or new. There appears to be a sizable one-story roof off the back of the new house.
   
  The low-slung house to the right is what this house used to look like.

  The front porch pillars look like they are assembled from local sandstone.

  There were workers everywhere and trucks, lots of trucks. I don’t know how a neighborhood handles the intrusion. We saw Mayflower moving trucks, electric company trucks towing (whoa!) phone poles, water utility trucks, shiny yellow dump trucks, and lots of earth movers. The security and vehicles and white tents span a few blocks.

  Blue shirt workers were everywhere, but no Ty Pennington. We were told he does two houses at once: He is there for the destruction and then flies back for the reveal. (I don’t know when he paints and drills and saws stuff.)

  The reveal is tomorrow. I heard someone saying, “Well, no one is camping out yet.” It would be thrilling to be behind the MOVE-THAT-BUS moment, but taking my sleeping bag and a thermos of soup to that work site for the next 50 degree 20 hours sounds daunting.

  We watched as volunteers in their section were tagged for jobs: “Could you four go help move leftover baseboards from the livingroom?”

  
  The actual show airs in December. Forgive my poor cell phone pics. Here are more of the house:
  
  And now to prove that Lois and Ariana were there, I took a pic of them with the house, uh, I mean, PortaPottie, in the background. *shaking head*
  
  Oh man.
  ||||||  lynard

  • 12:06 am
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