These home improvement TV shows are so useless, and tend to piss me off. Almost everything I own I built, and built it using recycled lumber, and other building materials. Then I see these shows on tv. It seems that their main goal is to waste as many materials as possible, wreck as much as they can, and then use the most expensive materials that can be bought. They act as is resources are unlimited and every home owner has unlimited money to spend. First, they start with a nice looking smaller home, that I'd die to own. Then they pretty much destroy the place, being sure to waste and wreck as much as they can. They bring in huge dumpsters to dispose of perfectly good, used lumber. They toss out metal items that could be sold to a recycler and/or reused. They take older but well made cabinets and rather than remove a few screws or nails from the wall, so someone else can enjoy these used cabinets, they bust the hell out of them with sledge hammers and sawsalls, and toss them all in the dumpster. Finally they start to rebuild. They make the small house into a hube mansion that only a politician could afford to heat and keep clean, and they cant put in a common formica cabinet, but have to use imported and expensive marble, and install multi-thousand dollar sinks, and spend a fortune on everything.
I dont know about you, but I am perfectly happy with my formica counter top, recycled stainless sink, and my $50 Moen faucet. My vinyl floor tiles are just fine, and my electrical switches and outlets are common ivory colored and dont cost $50 each because they are ultra fancy. After all, most of them are hidden behind furniture anyhow. To me, fancy is putting up a little wallpaper instead of painting, and yah, I did spend a few extra bucks to get some extra fancy trim in my living room, but didn't go into debt for the rest of my life to do it.
Heck, it's a house. I sleep there, eat there, and most of the rest of my life is spent either working or socializing outside my home. Everyone needs a roof over their head, and caves are sort of outdated and hard to find. We dont need to live in caves, but then there are the other extremes. Why do most people need such huge homes and why do they go into debt for life to build them, when that debt means they will have to spend more time on the job and less time in that house. It just dont make sense. Of course, most people dont live or build places like that, but there are some that do. Yet, if you watch these Home Improvement shows, you'd thing everyone needs to own a 40 room home at a cost of 5.5 million dollars. And of course, to build them, we must waste and wreck as much as we can, so that those who could use them, will never get them. Yah, it's just TV, but it still pisses me off.