HGTV ADD

It’s a condition. Some may call it a disorder, even a disease. Not sure if you’ve been stricken with HGTV ADD? Here are the symptoms:

You have a strong desire to improve your home but not a strong desire to actually do anything about it.

On Day One of “Project: re-tile your kitchen” you leave, thinking it’s going to be done for you when you return 24 hours later.

When a problem arises with your home office renovation, you keep looking around for some shirtless stud to solve it.

While watching shows on HGTV, you use your Ti-faux to fast forward through all the work so you can see the before and after shots.

When tackling home improvement projects you find yourself wishing that your life was in speed-cam and that everything you did was in fast-motion video (Except for the part when the sun goes down and comes back up in five seconds—then you’d miss out on sleeping.)


If you’ve got three or more of these, you’re HGTV ADD. You probably thought that by sitting on your couch and watching hours of HGTV, you would become a home improvement guru. Instead, it’s had the opposite effect. Now you equate home projects with lying around in your underwear, remote in one hand, fistful of Oreos in the other. You can’t stand to do the actual work. Because in real life, this work takes more than 22 minutes. Sometimes it takes 22 hours. Or even 22 days. It sucks.

How do I know so much about this disease? I’m not only the founder, I’m also a victim. I watch “Design on a Dime” and I think that I, too, can spend $92 and have a whole new living room. I watch “Design Remix” and think that I, too, will randomly find some discarded fabric under my bed that can be easily turned into curtains. I watch “Trading Spaces” and think that my neighbors could quickly transform my dining room and it wouldn’t be tacky. (Yes, that’s on TLC but I blame them too).

So what’s the remedy? There are two options:

1. Continue watching home improvement shows but adopt the motto “don’t try this at home.”

2. Stop watching home improvement shows. To do this you’ll have to get rid of the channel altogether. You can’t be trusted.

Actually, there’s a third option and I think it’s what I’ll do: continue watching HGTV, send in videos to every single show to convince them to re-do your house, room by room. If you’ve got a sob story, try “Extreme Makeover, Home Edition.”

Since there’s no known cure yet, we'll always have HGTV ADD. But at least we get to watch shirtless studs while we suffer.