One of my friends is an Interior Designer who was the featured designer on early seasons of the HGTV show, My First Place. The show featured first-time home owners who bought a fixer-upper and had very little money to fix it up. The designer does a makeover of several rooms to show the homeowners how to create a dream home on a tight budget. I don’t believe my friend was paid for her design work, including the on-camera appearances—it was mainly done for the bragging rights. As for the cost of the renovation, the homeowners did not pay for the work done (it came out of the production budget or was donated by manufacturers or retailers).

The dirty secret was that only part of the rooms were remodeled. The producers used tight camera shots and limited angles to show only the renovated parts of the rooms. So only half of a living room might be remodeled, while the other half was never shown. Or three quarters of a kitchen was remodeled, while the cabinets and wall facing away from the camera were not touched. In one case, they remodeled only one corner of the room. But the camera angles and editing made it appear that the rooms were completely remodeled. The homeowners who had little money to start with were left to clean up the mess and finish the rest of the room themselves.