Truth in Advertising...and Home Improvement Shows

There should be a law against running those home improvement shows without a disclaimer stating the reality of what they are doing and what actually results. You can make any house or yard look pretty for a camera, but when you live with it, it takes on a different appearance.

We were watching one where a backyard was completely revamped, but it was entirely impractical for everything except looking cute on television. The homeowners dutifully uncovered their eyes and politely oohed and ahhed for the cameras, but in a few weeks,I'm certain reality hit. Anyone trying to maintain that landscaping would be cursing a blue streak. They applied a mulch made from old tires that was separated from the lawn by an measly one-inch-high bender board, and the woman said that besides a mulch, it could serve as a sandbox for their kids. Right! Within seconds of the kids starting to play, the lawn would be full of hard rubber pellets just waiting for a lawn mower to throw them all over the entire back yard, or to break a window, or to smack the neighbor's poodle. However, you could always tell the kids to clean the pellets out of the grass when they get through playing…couldn’t you?

They also had big flower pots and a picnic table and chairs sitting on the grass. How would you like to drag a heavy table around everyt time you wanted to mow the grass beneath it? And can’t you just see the gouges made in the lawn by someone dragging the table? Of course, you could always find someone to carefully lift it away and then carry it back into place. Anyone who thinks that will happen has never mowed a lawn!

In the days before home improvement television, dad always cursed magazines like Better Homes and Gardens, for showing all the cutesy cabinets and built-ins that took forever to build and were impractical. Unwitting homeowners wanted their project to look just like the one in the magazine, but had no idea how expensive or impractical it would be, and they wouldn’t listen when you tried to tell them.

And they say car dealers mislead customers.