April 16, 2008

HGTVetoed

I am always on the look out for opportunities to get on TV. I’m not interested in eating bugs Survivor-style and I certainly never wanted to be vying for the attention of one guy along with 24 other women. That’s desperate and not at all my style. But getting on a makeover show like "What Not to Wear," or an HGTV room redo has been a dream for a long time.

My family says I dress too nicely to get on WNTW. I beg to differ, but no one’s going to be nominating me. There’s just really no one else besides Lil C around me all day to see that I rarely exit pajamas until about 1 or 2 p.m. Her camcorder skills are still sort of. . . developing.

So, when I saw an opportunity to get on an HGTV show this summer, I jumped at it. The show is called "Summer Showdown" and I was ecstatic to see that you didn’t have to live in LA or Chicago to apply. The show is looking for the worst living room, bedroom, kitchen and backyard in America. Then they have a designer showdown and you get your room completely made over.

I submitted our bedroom, which boasts pink carpet, brown sponge-painted walls (neither of those my doing) and a blue bedspread. My parents kept telling me we would never get picked because our room isn’t that bad, but I knew it was and then some.

I told them about how I’ve never had a headboard on my bed, unless you count the time that I bought a piece of fence for $10 at Home Depot and painted it and stuck it behind my bed. I told them that my dressers are falling apart thanks to my Dad loading the drawers with hand weights and then trying to slide the dresser around by himself when we moved into this house. I told them that everything I try to do to make the room better, only seems to make it worse. I told them I would get over my fear of long flights and get on a plane to LA for the season finale in May.

Less than 24 hours after filling out the online application, I got a call from the producer of the show, confirming that my bedroom pretty much sucks. She called my home phone; she called my cell phone and she emailed me at both of my email addresses. She told me she was throwing our room into the final mix and that they were "really really interested in our room." She asked me to make a video of the room and our family and submit it to their uploading website asap.

Mr. BBM and I spent three nights making that video. We planned it out, were creative as we could be, and made something that I think rivals my debut Carrie Underwood lip sync. We stayed up until 2 a.m. several nights in a row creating, editing and getting excited about it.

When we uploaded the video, there was only one other video in the bedroom submissions folder. Mr. BBM clicked on it and we watched our competition. (I know, totally shouldn’t have but we did anyway.) We figured we had it in the bag.

Last week, the producer emailed me and said they were still "up in the air" and that she would be in touch soon. Last night, I got the bad news. We didn’t get picked. I figured that if we did, our house would be as good as sold. My realtor was excited too, waiting for word. I also figured that even if they made my room so fantastic that I didn’t want to leave it, I could still take any new furniture and accessories with me and then mimic the paint color and flooring in my new house. I was so excited.

So, the bad news is that I won’t be appearing on HGTV. The good news is that I guess I only have the second worst bedroom in America. That is definitely a selling point.