HGTV

Our family has become addicted to HGTV.  It's all my mother-in-law's fault.  She came to visit a few weeks ago and exposed us to her favorite show Love It or List It.  This is a show where people with ridiculous amounts of money have a renovation budget for their current home and another budget for buying a new home.  The show's hosts are a designer and a realtor, so the one remodels the current house into fabulousness, while the other takes them around to look at three other fantastic houses.  At the end, the family has to decide whether they're going to love their remodel and stay, or list their current house (which has dramatically increased in value) and buy one of the new ones they've seen.  It is dangerously addictive.

For those of you not familiar with HGTV's programming style, they do a marathon of a different show each day, so when you finish one episode it immediately jumps into another one, leading to binge watching.  It also leads to another phenomenon.  Let's say Love It or List It is the Monday show, but it's Wednesday, and you need a fix.  When you turn on HGTV, you discover another similar type of show which is also running a marathon.  At this point we have also gotten sucked into Fixer Upper and Property Brothers.  I'm almost afraid to turn on HGTV now.

In some ways though, this is the perfect new addiction for our family in transit.  Since we're living in a hotel, looking at beautiful houses is soothing and helps us get excited for our new home.  HGTV is also appropriate for all members of the family, which works well when there's one main television area.  Jeff's other addiction, Law and Order, is definitely not family friendly.

One of the most hilarious parts is that Vivian has gotten really into HGTV and has definite opinions about whether a family should love or list their current property.  Pretty soon she's going to start spouting design and real estate jargon.  Jeff's first homework assignment once he gets our technology set up in Thailand is going to be figuring out how to get us our new favorite shows.  Now I have to go, Beachfront Bargain Hunt is on, and I'm going to take a vicarious trip to the beach!