‘Instant Dream Home’ required creative solutions, like a copter
Reality TV shows create ridiculously artificial deadlines to amp up drama. That’s the crux of shows like “Project Runway,” “Lego Masters” and “Top Chef.”
Back in the 2000s, Ty Pennington as host made an art out of quick-fire renovations on ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”
Tom Forman, a producer of “Extreme Makeover,” had a variant idea that Netflix ultimately said yes to: Fix up a home in a span of just 12 hours. Have the family leave at 7 a.m. and come back 12 hours later to a transformed pad. Called “Instant Dream Home,” the show, shot in metro Atlanta last year, features the type of rush jobs that make great dramatic TV but make no sense in the real world.
So the types of projects that could be built on site over a matter of weeks under normal circumstances have to be resolved in hours, forcing the designers to come up with creative solutions.
“The whole conceit we wanted to play out like ‘Mission Impossible,’ ” said David Metzler, “Instant Dream Home” showrunner.
For example, a kitchen in the first episode had to be built out in advance and forklifted into the home in two parts through a space in the wall that would later be filled by French doors. The wall clearance? Two inches.
For one family with five home-schooled children, the designers built a schoolroom for the backyard. But given the time deadline, the schoolroom was built in advance, then brought on site. The hill gradient to get it delivered by forklift was too steep.
The solution: A monstrous crane used for skyscrapers literally lifted the school house 100 feet in the air over the house and gently placed it in the backyard.
The craziest install involved a special window feature placed on an angled roof that enabled the homeowners to open it and have a small patio. But it was too fragile and heavy to install speedily from the ground up. So the producers hired a helicopter to fly the window to the location with all the thumping thrills of a Tom Cruise movie.
“That was my idea,” Metzler said.
Friends or family members nominated deserving families who needed home rehabs. They taped audition videos explaining their needs, but the families were told that they were not selected.
Instead, on the day of the renovation, the friend or family member had to engineer an excuse to get the family away from their home for 12 hours. In some cases, the family was told a minor project was being done when in fact their house would undergo a massive upgrade worth $50,000 or more.
On the days renovation was done, “Instant Dream Home” would bring in more than 200 men and
women and four project managers to make the 12-hour rebuild happen.
The show employs a ticktock sound a la “24” as if the home might explode if they don’t get it all done in time. Despite inevitable obstacles, they manage to get seemingly everything they need done — or at least make everything look good enough for the cameras
“Sometimes, the paint was still wet when they walked in,” Metzler said. “And like any real-life construction project, there’s a punch list at the end. You come in later and fix things that don’t quite work.”
Only once in the eight episodes did they finish late. One family on arrival caught some of the crew members sheepishly leaving the home.
To keep the show moving, host Danielle Brooks (“Orange is the New Black”) was there to motivate the troops, saying things like “Less talking, more moving!”
She also has no home renovation knowledge but that was not her job.
“She has a big personality,” Metzler said. “We wanted someone to talk directly to the audience and contextualize things. She was incredible with the reveals.”