Love It or List It

As a millennial, I don’t have cable TV. It’s not that I can’t afford it (avocado toast isn’t that expensive), it just seems like the vestiges of a bygone era. These days, everything is on demand. You can watch whatever you want, whenever you want, for as long as you want, til you run out of content.

However, whenever I have access to cable the first thing I do is switch over to HGTV.

I just can’t get enough of that damn channel.

Everything on there is golden. Between the DIY projects, the backyard makeovers, the home renovations, it’s all glorious. I’ll never tire of watching a couple shopping for a house with their budgets of one million dollars, earned from their hard-working careers as butterfly catchers and dog walkers.

Actually, I heard dog walkers make a lot of money.

But the best show, my favourite show, has to be Love It or List It.

It’s the Hannah Montana of HGTV: the best of both worlds. You get the home renovation, you get the house hunting, you get the drama, you get the rivalry, you even get a slight undertone of sexual tension.

What’s not to love?

Every episode begins the same way. It shows you an in-depth look of the house as it stands and the family that resides within it. The family, of course, is in just as much disarray as their house. Jack can’t handle the hour-long commute to work anymore. Jill is going to die if she doesn’t figure out how to get more storage space. Little Suzie is heartbroken that she can’t fit a swing set in the backyard. And Fido? Can someone get some walking paths up in here, please? He’s tired of pissing on the same damn trees every day.

If only their home was nicer! That would solve all of their problems.

One half of the couple always hates the house; they detest everything from the paint, to the layout, to the location. There is nothing that can make them love this house. They may as well molotov cocktail it into oblivion.

The other half loves it. It has good bones! It needs a little TLC! The paint colour isn’t that bad, and that’s fixable, right? Of course it is! All it needs is a little ingenuity, and a budget of like half a million dollars. What could go wrong?

Then we meet our saviours from this hellish nightmare.

A tall, attractive man in a perfectly tailored suit is siding with the molotov-cocktail half of the equation, eager to whisk the family away to a brand new house in a new location. A fresh start. All he has to do is find a house with five bedrooms on the main floor, a perfectly updated kitchen with both an island, a peninsula, and a walk-in pantry, a pool in the backyard, only fifteen minutes away from Jack’s work and from Suzie’s school, and has abundant local trail systems for Fido. Easy.

A tall, attractive woman in a perfectly tailored suit is siding with the good-bones half of the equation, just begging to get in there with a sledgehammer and some paint swatches. All she has to do is completely gut the house, turn the closed floor plan into an open one, create a huge master bathroom and walk-in closet out of nothing, and find Jack a new job with growth opportunity closer to home. Totally do-able.

Of course, nothing goes to plan.

There’s nothing for sale in their ideal neighbourhoods that Jack and Jill can afford on their modest budget, so they’ll only get four bedrooms on the main floor instead of five. It’s a travesty.

It turns out that the layout of their current house is like that for a reason, and by getting rid of one wall they now need to re-do the electrical and HVAC system on the entire house, which will cost them an additional two hundred thousand dollars.

The plot thickens, camera angles panning around bushes so we can all sit on the edge of our seats and watch as this couple’s lives unravel. We join them on tours from house to house to house, but nothing is working. Until, finally, the realtor finds the perfect fit. Where has this house been this whole time? Was he saving it for the end, or what? Even the die-hard good-bones half of the couple is in love, already picturing their Christmas dinners and summer BBQs.

But, before they can put an offer in on this house, they need to see what’s been done to their old one. It’s a miracle that the renovations take just as long as their house hunting, and that the home of their dreams is just going to sit there on the market, patiently awaiting their decision.

Somehow, she’s done it. They walk up to their home, which has had a total facelift. Their mouthes drop open, they jump up and down, they cry, they hug, as their wildest dreams have come true. It’s perfect, right from the open floor plan, to the kitchen with the island and the pantry, to the huge spa-like master bathroom. She even planted a new tree for Fido, and built Suzie the treehouse of her dreams.

This couple is now facing the hardest decision of their entire life.

The two tall, well-dressed individuals retreat to one end of the house to exchange in sexually-charged witty banter while the couple decides the fate of their future.

Do they Love It…?

Or do they List It?

Finally, they come to the dramatic conclusion.

They’re going to…

Love it!

The happy couple is crying, Suzie and Fido are popping the champagne, all of their problems have been solved and they can’t wait to live the rest of their lives in their perfect home.

The tall, attractive woman in the perfectly tailored suit accepts congratulations from the tall, attractive man in the perfectly tailored suit, and they head off into the sunset where he will have to buy her a celebratory glass of wine.

I switch off the TV, feel-good endorphins rushing through my body. I think about my own kitchen, with the dented fridge and the green laminate countertops and the scuffed paint. It just needs a little TLC. Maybe that one wall isn’t load bearing. The floors, they could be refinished.

“Honey? Can we renovate the kitchen?” I call to the other room.

He pauses, considering his reply. “I’d rather just move.”