If you would have asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up circa 2009, I would have told you I wanted my own show on HGTV.

We didn’t watch a lot of TV growing up, but what my brothers and I did watch was reruns of The Price is Right (preferably the seasons hosted by Bob Barker), The Brady Bunch and I somehow roped them into watching Cake Boss on TLC and our favorite, the early seasons of HGTV’s Design Star– a  reality show where contestants faced design challenges to compete for their own design show on HGTV.

I LOVED the show and didn’t miss an episode. It all seemed so glamorous and fun to 12-year-old me. In fact, I was so inspired and became so HGTV-obsessed that when I created my first email address in circa 2009, it was HGTVfreak58@yahoo.com. Why a random 58 tacked on? Fifty-eight was the channel number. I still can’t believe my mother let me use the word “freak” in an email address, but it was true – I was an HGTV freak and surely I too, could become a design star. 🌟

I began taking the graph paper I was supposed to be doing my math homework on and sketching out “my dream home.” I would cut out pictures from the Pottery Barn Teen magazines I got in the mail and design a whole room around that season’s newest piece of furniture. It was always my dream to have one of the bunk beds with the bed on top and a desk underneath so I could have room for the pink couch that would have never fit in my actual bedroom.

While my email address eventually did change, my love for decorating and a dream of creating a home didn’t. I briefly considered majoring in Interior Design, but when I realized it was in the School of Architecture and would require more math classes and numbers than I really cared to participate in, I pursued a degree that would allow me to use my second love: writing. I decided to major in Public Relations in the School of Journalism and figured I could enjoy design/decorating without a formal degree.

Fast-forward to the fall of 2021 and Harrison and I were house-hunting in Tulsa, before our wedding in January 2022. I quickly realized that House Hunters (another HGTV classic) had really set me up to have unrealistic expectations for how this process was going to go. Primarily because we were spending our own money – not Bill and Catherine’s who were looking for a move-in ready home in a quaint neighborhood outside of Charlotte with a $800,000 budget.

The more houses we looked at, the more we realized that most did not look anything like they did in the photos on Zillow … We also had a nice “Welcome to Adulthood” reality check when we realized that the homes that were “beautiful” and “move-in ready” in the midtown Tulsa neighborhoods we wanted to live in were way out of our newlywed budget. So, I had to quickly channel my inner HGTV-freak and begin looking at the “potential”.

When we first saw our house, my first thought was exactly that: “Well, it certainly has potential.” I had some concerns though about how this was going to become my “dream house” and still wasn’t sure what to think when we pulled up to look at it for the first time. But, after walking in, it felt warm and inviting, even if it did need some (major) tuning up. After much thought and prayer, we decided to go for it and the cozy brick house on Knoxville Ave was soon ours.

I’ll continue how exactly my HGTV dreams came true in the next post. Click here to keep reading!

• November 2024