Filming Day 5: Snowboarding

*Note: It's 11:40pm. I kept my word and published all of the filming posts in my "draft box" in one day. Feels good to have that out of the way and now it's time to move on to more recent news...

It seems that not all of the producers of the show like to get into the hobbies of the house hunters, but Donna and Susan asked us time and time again to be loaded up with activities because they really like to get the viewers invested in the hunters. We were positive we wanted to go snowboarding as well as biking, I think we actually had a harder time picking a favorite restaurant to film our decision. 

The days of eliminating one house and deciding between the remaining two (example, lets knock off house 1, okay between house 2 and 3 we chose...dum dum dum...house number...3!) are over. They say it's not natural so they wanted us to run through each place and get into the pros and cons of all of them, like we naturally would had we seriously only looked at 3 houses in 3 days and decided to buy one of them on whim!

We ended up at Silver Fork Lodge in the middle of Big Cottonwood Canyon for our decision/lunch. We were only allowed to put away half of our lunch during "break time" and as we needed to save food on our plate for filming our "discussion". Filming the decision was super weird at first, the eyes of everyone in the restaurant were on us, and Susan was adamant that we actually eat and drink while talking / filming. Apparently the network gets annoyed when hunters discuss their homes over a meal that they aren't interested in touching. Timing our conversation between bites of food and sips of water, all while running through the homes and zoning out the onlookers in the cafe was multitasking at its finest. 

Eric had to ditch his Flake hat and I had to touch up my hair as they wouldn't let us rock any headwear on camera at the table. Funny how our younger generation doesn't think twice about the little things that can be sensitive to the general public. Older generations may find wearing a hat at the table offensive and inconsiderate, so we had to roll with it. I had been wearing a headband all day, had flat hair/ridge marks on my forehead, and wasn't happy about that. I really don't think the network would have received any complaints if we kept our beanies on over dinner. But they have to think of everything I guess...and get the randomest complaints for things they do.

Susan was able to get lift tickets comped for us at Brighton, and this was our last venue of the day and entire episode. By the time we made it up there for filming there was only an hour left before the lifts shut down, so we didn't have much time to get a lot of riding in. Also, it didn't help that it took me 30 minutes to get my freakin' boots on! My feet must have grew since I got pregnant but my boots don't fit me at all. After 10 minutes of trying to put my boots on, Bruce started filming and threatened to put it on the show. I made eye contact with the camera (a no no) to assure he wouldn't. He said he'd show it during the credits, like the bloopers. I knew he was kidding, and he was because it didn't make the cut. But what embarrassing thing did make the cut was me falling off the lift! Why did they honestly have to show that? Yup, they made me look real good on the show. It was our first time on the slopes for the season and I hate getting off the lift. I was rusty, slipped...and unfortunately they showed it.

We had a blast with the crew and the entire experience. It was sort of surreal for the project to be over just as I felt I was getting good at it, but it was a relief at the same time. Saying goodbyes in the parking lot was actually kind of hard, especially with Chuck and Bruce as we'd grown to love them. Eric and Bruce still text every now and then as we bounce ideas for our kitchen off of him.

Overall, filming House Hunters was an unforgettable experience that we will always cherish along with our first home purchase. Now, would we ever do it again for our next home? Hmmmm..........

Filming Day 5: DEMO

This is the moment we've been waiting for!

I took the first hit and let Eric and Greg, the strong manly men, take care of the rest. It was thrilling to take a sledgehammer to the wall. I actually didn't want to stop and took 3 more hits. I was sure they were going to air this part...instead they showed me getting my foot stuck in the wall. Thanks HGTV. Appreciate it. 

Eric made much more progress in his hits (that sledgehammer is heavy) and looked sexy doing it. I remember yelling, "give me that dining space, babe!".

Greg helped, but sadly they didn't show him either.

Susan thought it looked fun so she took a couple hits too! We let everyone have a turn, but some people were poor sports and didn't want to (Bruce and Chuck).

This was our last take interview about our home where we got to talk about how excited we were about it. We must have become pro's by this time because we nailed it in one take.

Usually, they come back weeks or months later to film the "after", however, they wanted to change things up with our episode. They loved that we were going to take a sledgehammer to the wall to knock it down, they wanted to show the renovations in action instead. All too often they end up coming back at a later date and nothing has changed in the home, so the fact that we were willing to knock it out right away made them want to capitalize on that. Oh if they could see this place now! Part of me wants to show off what we've done with this place, but it's relieving to not have to worry about another deadline of getting our home in perfect order for their return.

Filming Day 5

 

We came prepared with space heaters so we wouldn't freeze our butts off.

Day 5 was a jam packed day, we were filming at three locations. Demo at our house, announce decision at Silverfork Lodge, and snowboarding at Brighton. This was our last day of filming, sort of bittersweet as the day neared its end.  We had so much fun this day that I've broken down to 3 separate posts.

We invited everyone over that day, my mom, Eric's parents, and Greg and Shasta. My mom was going to pretend to be a neighbor, Greg helped with the demo, and Eric's parents wanted to watch and take pictures. Thanks to Mike we have tons of pictures. We hadn't been taking very many since we were so busy so I'm glad he was able to capture day 5 on camera. 

We were so glad to have Leila join us again for filming. She enjoyed the hustle and bustle of day 5.

Wow, it's crazy to see what our kitchen looked like before. I can't get over how horrible the drop down ceiling and awful florescent lights were. 

Playing "knock knock"

Apparently, Susan didn't ask my neighbor if they could use her house for my mom to walk down her path because my neighbor (a sweet old lady) poked her head out and gave us the dirtiest look. I asked my mom if they'd knocked on the door to let her know, my mom said, "nope, I just did what I was told". Oops! 

My mom was such a great actress and so cute! I loved working with her "on set". Ha. Ok, not really on set but I kinda wanted to type that out.

I don't know what Eric was doing up here...

Bruce has renovated his home and others, so he knew how to prep the space before we started demo. He was a smart man to cover the vents before dust went flying everywhere. 

They didn't air this part but Susan had us have a picnic on the floor (complete with a blanket, picnic basket, and pb&j's) so we could say, "you know, we don't have our dining space right now but once we knock that wall out this is where the table will go". Or something like that, as I'm typing this 6 months later I can still hear Susan loud and clear dictating what we should say. Eric was glad they left that part out, he says it was "dumb", I thought it was cute!

Filming Day 4

 

House #3: Murray

If we thought day 3 was easier, day 4 was even better because it was OUR home. We knew what we loved and didn't love and it was just an easy filming day. Except Susan said we were too positive, she said she knows that this is the home we purchased but she needed us to be more negative. We didn't love everything about our home by any means. But in our head we'd already accepted the flaws of the home and had been thinking about how we were going to fix it/make it look better. Within the first few rooms of the home during the first take Susan was quick to stop us and say we were "being too nice" to our home.  We ended up starting over, this time staying away from being so quick to offer a solution to the problems we pointed out. I actually had a lot of fun with that as we started to beat up some of the things we were excited to change.

We filmed in November, the end of Fall. We warned the film crew we had a butt-load of leaves on our front yard and asked if we should rake them up, but they told us not to worry. But when we arrived for the day (they always arrived much earlier than we did) Bruce and Chuck had raked our leaves with what they could find around the house, a snow shovel and and push broom. Luckily, the homeowner left us all sorts of goodies for the house. Like camping chairs, rakes, shovels, paint, barrel, etc. This made the list of things we needed to buy as homeowners a lot shorter. He seemed to have left everything except a lawn mower.

There was one minor hiccup in filming our home this day, we had NO HEAT! Among all the fuss of getting ready to move and film, we had neglected to move the gas bill into our name (we transferred the electricity tho, how'd we get so dumb?) We had to be there all day in the freezing conditions. It was warmer outside than inside. Before filming started we called Questar and got it changed over, but they weren't going to make it out for a few more days, so we put our game faces on and suffered through the cold.

The famous shower shot. This is the one time Susan told us to take a picture, one we couldn't miss... the men in the shower.

Confessionals this time around went much smoother and I could see the satisfaction in Susan's eyes. There's just something uncomfortable when the camera is staring you, and only you, straight in the eye.

This was Julia's best confessional, and they didn't even use it!

After filming our house it was a wrap for us and the only day where we didn't have anything on the schedule after. Well, we were suppossed to go to the Antique Mall (because they wanted to show us stuff that we enjoyed, biking, downtown, antiqueing, but we mostly covered that in Sugarhouse). So we were able to go home and spend the rest of the day with my mom and the rest of the family. 

She made my favorite for dinner that night, pozole! She makes the best pozole around. It's her specialty, and we request it every time she visits.