The 'Eat Your Food and Like It' Complaint Thread

richardandtracy

My biggest current complaints with 'Home Improvement' shows are listed below:

• There is never any clutter. Complete Balderdash. Life is full of clutter.
• Grey is NOT a colour. It's just dirty white. And White is horrible if no other real colours are used in the house.
• Concrete is NOT attractive. Actually, it's just grey made physical and it's horrible.
• Virtually NOBODY can spend £500k on a property that already cost £800k. In fact, they're unlikely to be able to even think about £500k for the property itself.
• How much do carpets cost compared to dropped & smashed plates? I reckon warm feel carpets save money on broken crockery and are nicer to walk on, play on, lounge on and the cat paws can grip them when the cat goes from asleep to racing away in an eye blink.
• I'd like to re-iterate that polished concrete floors are a horrible way to use a horrible material.
• Open plan houses are drafty and don't have enough walls for pictures. And when your budget is a bit tight, heating a sensible size room is more affordable than heating an open plan house.
• The quality of workmanship in a century old house is frequently a lot better than in modern houses, and they've already lasted 100 years to prove the quality of materials. So DON'T DEMOLISH THEM becuse you need a room refresh and end up building anew.

That's about all my complaints about home improvement shows. I think I covered the programs from start to finish with my various objections. Oh, and the presenters are often either smug and patronising or offensively jolly hockeysticks. So, apart from that little list. I love home improvement shows.

Regards

Richard

memcneil70

Yeah, I will note I absolutely hate the 'games, jokes, puns, and cute family time spots' that are stuffed into a show, which otherwise might have been able to highlight the skills, costs, or real issues of the renovations of older or even newer homes. My current cable package doesn't offer DIY but I used to get it and it was better than HGTV in that sense. I really need to watch more PBS offerings if I could just remember to, 'This Old House' addressed some pretty tough issues in the early episodes.

If I ever had the money to build or renovate I would like a large room big enough for a series of bookshelves (for books), cupboards, and windows facing over a garden patio. The floor would be solid surface able to handle be dripped on by either chalk dust, paint, water, dye, or to find pins, needles, or stuff you would not want on a carpet. The laundry room would be off to the side for said dyed product could be transferred back and forth easily. And an area for computers, cameras, etc...

I occasionally buy lottery tickets with that dream. :-)

NylonGirl

I use Firefox as my main web browser. I haven't had any problems saving passwords or even credit card numbers. The only thing I miss is Chrome will let you create a temporary virtual card number to use instead of the real one, which is good if your favorite CG site has a history of leaking your real credit card information.

I also haven’t had any problems with javascript. But for whatever reason, the Costco website works in Chrome and has not worked in Firefox.

Now my biggest issue with these home improvement shows is the unrealistic couples they portray. Like, you have a husband who makes homemade greeting cards and a wife who does nothing, but they have a budget of $300,000 for home improvement. And they’re really worried because it will cost $500,000 to upgrade their $1,500,000 house and they only have a budget of $300,000 for home improvement. And somehow by the end of the show, the host manages to save money by using a vintage lamp she found on e-Bay so they are able to do the upgrade with just $499,000 instead of $500,000, which turns out to be within their budget.

It’s about as realistic as a Hallmark Movie in which the million dollar lawyer husband is afraid to tell his wife that he wants to give up his million dollar job and grow his own herbs instead. And the wife is afraid to tell her husband she doesn’t want to live the life of a million dollar lawyer and really just wishes she could be more connected with nature. And they spend the entire movie not telling each other the truth until the truth is accidentally revealed at the end. And they live happily ever after as parsley farmers but somehow still having millions of dollars.

memcneil70

LOL

SilverGirl

Have you folx watched Escape to the Chateau? I love it because it's so /real/... I mean, yeah, they're renovating a French castle, and often not to my personal taste, but things go wrong and bleeped-out swears are occasionally dropped, The money is tight, so in the earlier seasons they were not living in great conditions, and they're mostly doing it themselves. Sometimes they just have to save up and wait before they can tackle something big, and there's a lot of upcycling to make the money stretch. When something comes together it feels like a triumph because they worked so hard for it!!

I haven't seen the last few seasons, but when the kids and I were temp living with my parents, Mom and Teen Kiddo (then 7) and I watched every week. (We were also, for a bunch of it, gutting and renovating my house due to the damage the ex did to it, so it was nice to not feel alone with some of the "oh, so this entire room is full of bat guano, that's gonna be fun" type issues.)

I know there are a couple other similar that Mom follows, and I could get the names if anyone is interested.