Dream House

I was just watching the HGTV channel (Home and Garden TV), and the show that was on was called "Dream House." It was the story of an engaged couple who wanted to build their dream house on a big hill. I turned it on in the middle, so I didn't get all the details, but I got a few. They took out a loan for $415,000 to build the house. Of course it took longer than they thought; they had to keep pushing the open house party later and later.

When the dream kitchen was being completed, they found out that they had spent all their loan money, so they couldn't afford appliances. They took out another loan for $85,000. I don't know how many bedrooms this place was, but it was enormous. It was somewhere in the south, I think, so you could get a huge house for half a mil.

They got it all done except for the basement, they had a huge open house party, and they celebrated the beginning of their new lives together. This show took you from bare bones to completed house, with all the nitty gritty, emotions, and problems that come with building a house. It took one year to complete. Happy ending at the open house party, right? Wrong.

The next shot was the couple putting a For Sale sign in the front yard. I thought, "You have got to be kidding me!" After one month, the couple realized that they couldn't afford to live in the house because the mortgage payments would be $3,500 a month. They didn't want all of their money to go just to house payments.

And they had not thought of this before????

The daughter said that she should have listened to her dad more, but she and her fiance just wanted and wanted and wanted. If I was her dad, I would have walked away in the beginning. They wanted to sell the place for a million dollars. Pretty expensive and time consuming flip, if you ask me. The final quote was from the contractor, who said, "The lesson from this project should be to just keep moving forward, don't look back."

OH MY GOD.

I wanted to jump into the TV and push the contractor aside and say, "Actually, the real lesson here is DON'T BE GREEDY and live within your means and 2 people don't need that much space!!!" This is what's wrong with our society. I am disgusted. I'm going to have a yard sale tomorrow and get rid of what little excess I have.