If It's my Hotel, This Must be HGTV

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: With apologies to the marvelous 60s comedy, IF IT'S TUESDAY, THIS MUST BE BELGIUM; I stole their title because if I'm in a hotel room, there is one thing on the increasingly wide screens in the room: HGTV. 

 

Readers, I looooove HGTV. I get the HGTV magazine (or as my son calls it, middle-aged mom p*rn.) But I don't have cable, except for the internet - we cut the cord some twenty years ago. So for me, watching the channel is a pleasure reserved for hotels and Carter's Automotive waiting room, where I will sit for three hours waiting for my Honda to be fixed rather than arranging for a ride because Doug Carter has HGTV on. (Know your customers.)

 

What do I like? Love It or List It, where Realtor David hunts for a dream house for a couple while decorator Hillary races to renovate the place they already own to make it a dream come true. It's particularly amusing since my sister became a Realtor a few years ago - I always thought deciding based on seeing three houses was a bit premature, but now I know just how fictional it really is. There's always a BIG conflict between the couple; he MUST HAVE a man cave and she will DIE without a walk-in closet. They tour houses that look, no lie, 800% better than mine and turn up their noses.

 

The day my mother died (I promise this isn't a sad story) my girls and I were headed back from the New Jersey that had admitted her. (She had been transiting through Newark Airport when she had her stroke.) We're in shock, sleep-lagged, because we had driven from 1am to 7am to be there, and it we were crawling along the Merritt Parkway on the HOTTEST day of the year when our AC died. Rolling down the windows made it hotter inside the car. We struggled along for another three quaters of an hour when I said, "Not going to do this." 

 

I navigated off the Parkway as Youngest searched her phone for a hotel, and we too refuge in a deliciously cool Marriott. We all took lukewarm showers and, wrapped in hotel waffle robes, spent the rest of the day watching Beachfront Bargain Hunt and eating take out pizza. Out of a terrible twenty-four hours, its become a memory I cherish (and we still joke about the couple who passed on a gorgeous lakehouse because they were afraid their three-year-old would climb on the built in bookcases.

Househunters International is another fave for all of us, mostly because it features couples who have jobs like "yoga instructor" and "doggie portrait painter" looking for million dollar properties in exotic locales. Are they laundering Russian money? Drug mules? We'll never know. One couple was looking to buy an apartment in one of Brazil's smaller, beautifully colonial cities, and they had just graduated from college, like two years before. FROM COLLEGE. The girls and I stalked their social media to try to figure it out. (Turns out her family had $$$$$.)

My new must-see if Farmhouse Fixer, mostly because the adorably photogenic Jon Knight is as passionate about creaky old New England farmhouses as I am. He had be from the first kitchen demo, where instead of swinging mallets through the existing cabinets - also known as the HGTV money shot - he and his worked carefully removed them so they could be, you know, recycled and reused by someone. I love you, Jon! Please come up to Maine and do a show on my house. I'll start a GoFundMe to raise the necessary $140,000 - $180,000. You guys will all pitch in, right?

How about you, dear readers? Do you HGTV? And do you have a special show you save for those hotel stays?