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Everyone’s buzzing this week about HGTV‘s House Hunters being fake. To that I say, “No shit! NO ONE only looks at just three houses, chooses one of them, and then closes in, what, a month? With their boxes all unpacked, ready to awkwardly chop vegetables while they talk about how much they got used to all the things they pretended to hate.” Instead of acting outraged that a staged reality show is staged, I say LET’S DRINK!
I seriously watch HGTV all day long, so I’ve seen my fair share of House Hunters episodes. (I’m such a fan that I forced my dad’s real estate agent to let us tour an ACTUAL House Hunters-featured home in Texas. The agent who showed it confirmed all those things I suspected of being true.) I’ve seen the show so many times that, of course, I started to become BEYOND annoyed with the constant (and generally stupid as hell) complaints. But I love the show!
So, in order to cope with the barrage of home buyer idiocy (real or not, it’s still all up in my grill), I’ve developed my own drinking game. You know, lemons, lemonade, etc.
Wanna play it with me? Here’s how…
Take a drink every time…
- Someone mentions the lack of, or gets excited about the apparent splendor that is, double sinks.
- Someone complains about (CLEARLY UNCHANGEABLE!) paint colors.
- Someone complains about the backyard not being fenced.
- Someone says, “this [blank] is dated.”
- Someone complains that they “really wanted granite.”
- The woman says some variation of “well this is MY closet… where will you put YOUR stuff?”
- Someone says, “but we REALLY wanted stainless steel.”
- Someone complains about lack of crown moulding.
Take two drinks every time…
- Someone complains that their furniture won’t fit in a room.
- You see their current home with an entire room devoted to, and practically EXPLODING with, their kid’s toys.
- A man mentions how he’ll turn a room into a “man cave.”
- A woman contradicts that guy and argues that it’ll be her “craft room.”
Lightning round!
At the end of the show, all must submit their guess for which house they pick.
- Those who guess right don’t have to drink.
- Whoever guesses wrong has to drink whatever is left in their glass, which honestly, shouldn’t be all that much by this point.
Okay, House Hunter fans: what are YOUR drinking game rules? I know you have them!
80% of reality TV is staged. I don’t know why people are surprised, shocked, and disappointed by this.
The other 20% is Gordon Ramsay calling people “donkeys.”
I totally love this and Husband and I play it with or without drinks. I laughed out loud at the Double Sinks thing (what, you can sleep in the same bed, piss in the same pot but GOD FORBID YOU SHARE A SINK??). I’m also really good at guessing which house they’ll prefer.
Our rules:
1)When, after one of the above complaints, the Agent says “Why don’t we have a look over here?” and is clearly thinking “F$%k you.”
2)When a woman says “I’m just not really getting a good vibe from the house”.
3)Complaints about a lack of view or lack of space when it’s clearly going to be $50,000 over budget to have either a better view or more space.
4)Use of the word CHARM.
5)Use of the phrase “It has good bones.”
6)The phrase “We REALLY wanted an open concept layout.” (2 Drinks if all they’re looking at are tiny craftsman/colonials on the east coast.)
7)BOUNS! House Hunters International: When someone makes a reference to how the property really gives them (or doesn’t give them that) “____Insert Country or Culture Here___” feel.
NEWS FLASH: YOU’RE IMMERSED IN THAT COUNTRY/CULTURE, DING-A-LING. STOP EXPECTING EVERY SINGLE THING TO LIVE UP TO YOUR PRECONCEIVED NOTION ABOUT WHAT THAT CULTURE/COUNTRY SHOULD LOOK LIKE.
Great post, I heart it.
HAHAHA! Omg, House Hunters International needs it’s own separate drinking game for SURE. My favorite: “This is definitely different than what we’re used to in America.” NO SHIT!
Oh my gosh! This one woman was trying to buy a house in Noway (I think. Her man was from there) and she kept complaining about everything! She was the wooorst example of an entitled American woman! She complained that everything looked like a cottage and was too ‘strange’. It’s a different culture! It’s not supposed to be the same!
And what made me reaaal mad was that at the end of the episode instead of buying a gorgeous Nordic home (My dream house) she chose to spend 1 million dollars building a replica of her home in the States!
oh house hunters international… I get so worked up.
YES. That one specifically, I remember wanting to smack her. And another where an Army wife passed over two absolutely STUNNING Japanese homes in Okinawa in favor of the one most like her suburban monstrosity in Texas.
Did you see the one with the couple from Texas that were moving to I think England? Not only did they compare everything to Texas, but the women kept mocking the real estate agent’s accent!
OMG, THIS!! I would have killed to have moved in to either of the Okinawan homes (the one with the stained glass had me drooling). That was the first time I ever screamed at the TV and the last time I watched House Hunters International.
“where’s the dishwasher? there’s no tub? that thing is the AC?”
sometimes i hope they have follow up episodes to find out if the couple even stays married beyond that…
I lose my shit when the American searching for the “perfectly romantic garret apartment” in a historic Parisian building in the 14th arrondissement says “Whoa… this is a bathroom?! It’s tiny!!”
Duh, honey. What did you expect? That building was designed before indoor plumbing was a thing!
Are you serious?! Oh, that just breaks my heart! I can’t believe she didn’t buy the lovely Nordic home! That really does make me a little teary-eyed 🙁
Add-on drink for #7: The agent follows with, “That’s how we do it here in *country* !”
Oh god, HHInternational. I want to THROTTLE all the stereotypical American women who complain that the closets/bathrooms/bedrooms aren’t big enough for their seven hundred pairs of shoes or whatever. Or when they say “It simply MUST have an ‘American-style’ bathroom!”
GRRRR!
Or they freak out when “the house doesn’t come with a kitchen… they take it with them when they move”. Yeah, they do it here in the US too, but it’s called foreclosure!
Oh! Bonus points if the woman fakes an accent from that country. Sweet Cheesus and Crackers…I watched an episode of some American woman who had been living in England for a year with her partner, and she’s from Alabama or somewhere…BUT SHE HAD A ENGLISH ACCENT! It was such a bad fake accent too! Then halfway through the show, she accidentally slipped back to her normal accent, and the realtor was like…WTF. She got super embarrassed.
Take a drink every time someone says “This backyard isn’t big enough for *insert dumb dog name here* to run around.”
Take FIVE drinks any time the male of the couple has an opinion on anything (gay couples don’t count).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWoWHzq21tA
Mitchell and Webb (a british comedey duo) do a great sketch making fun of this show, basically pointing out the “requirements” of reality TV. You will laugh!
I <3 David Mitchell so so so much.
OMG!!! That was a beautiful thing. But… but but but — NO mention of the carpeting in the bathroom!??? 😉
Mitchell and Webb are genius!! You should look on youtube for ‘David Mitchell’s Soapbox’. Great stuff.
I’d add you have to take a drink every time an agent shows them a house outside their “desired” neighborhood. Everyone has to take drink if that’s the house they choose.
This is especially important in Toronto, for Love It or List It couples.
Apparently, only one Toronto neighborhood has any decent schools or amenities, and lives are ruined with any commute over 15 minutes.
Ugh, Love it or List it. GAH that show makes me so angry.
I would be drunk just from the double sinks alone!
**Drink anytime they have awkward b-roll of the couple trying to cook in their kitchen that’s too small – “oh boy I just bumped into you we need a bigger kitchen”
I love that part. It’s like, It would be so much easier if you both cooked with your elbows kind of tucked against your bodies like real people do it.
OMG I’d be so trashed by the end of ONE episode! LOL Love watching that show, but yeah, the people sometimes really get on my nerve. I’m sure my rented three bedroom, older townhouse would give them a lot to complain about, but we LOVE it!
1) i actually saw an episode once where the buyer didn’t like any of the three homes, so the show actually talked about showing the buyer more homes. so at least once or twice they’ve let the curtain drop a bit just to show that it sometimes takes more than 3 homes. not to mention, imagine how long the show would be if they showed the real process of visiting 20+ homes before making a decision. of course they narrow it down to three! anyone who is surprised at editing and staging in a reality show, is just naïve and ridiculous!
2) “someone mentions the lack of, or gets excited about the apparent splendor that is, double sinks.” haha no no seriously my real estate agent is like this!! if a bathroom doesn’t have double sinks, she sees that as a huge turn off and starts talking about what it’s going to take to put a second sink in. yeah they’re nice, and we want them, but it’s not a deal breaker!!
3) my biggest pet peeve is the “dated” comment! the other day i watched an episode where the agent told the couple that the carpet was a new type of shag. omg they wouldn’t let it go! the wife kept bitching about the outdated shag carpeting. it was beige and new! it wasn’t some 70’s remnant! it was just longer fibered carpet! but once they heard that word “shag” it immediately became “dated”! on another episode (international) a couple asked what was up with the ceiling and the agent said it was a style very popular in the 80’s for england. from that point forward the ceiling was dated and they didn’t want dated. um… you aren’t english! it’s not dated to you! it could be from last year and you wouldn’t have had a clue if no one had told you! arrrrrgh!! STFU WITH THE “DATED” BS!!
I’m pregnant right now, so I’ll have to play with crystal light mocktail mixes, but I can’t wait to play this game with some good booze!
Oh double sink… My FAVORITE is when they show the couple “struggling” to get shit done at their one lowly sink. Maybe that guy I married and I are weird, but we have NEVER tried to brush our teeth at the same time. Having only one sink in one location has never been that big of a problem.
my husband and i sometimes share the sink when we’re brushing teeth, though usually he goes to read reddit or facebook while he brushes and i watch a minute or two of tv in the bedroom and pet a cat. when we do stand at the sink, we don’t stand on each others feet and elbow check one another! it really isn’t that hard to coordinate spit times!
we share the shower too… never hear the buyers complain about only having one shower! one toilet in said bathroom (though we have two bathrooms) no one complains about that either!
My fiance share a bathroom that has one sink in a diagonal corner and we have no problem. One of us has to squish into a tiny corner while the other enjoys the relative freedom of the rest of the bathroom, but we just devolve into shoulder checking each other lightly back and forth for room as a joke. If a couple can’t laugh through those annoying things I can’t imagine how they’ll make it through life!
There was an episode recently where the couple wanted two toilets and maybe it was the same ones, or not, that was obsessed with having it in it’s own little room. Do these people use a public toilet??
Wait, what? When you said double sinks I thought you meant those kitchen sinks with a full size sink and then a smaller one for rinsing or whatever.
Even when I’m making crazy Sim houses I don’t think it ever occured to me to have two sinks in one bathroom, I had no idea this was a thing.
There was an episode last night where the husband was obsessed with having a “5 piece bathroom” which meant double sinks along with the toilet, shower, and separate tub. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen the husband care about the bathroom sinks.
Yea, we have antique porcelain stand sinks in our house. I didn’t know double sinks were a thing either. I mean, my dad gets up at 4 am for work (he does maintenance and needs to get in before the office workers to clean the offices) and my mom does the usual 9 – 5 business, so they don’t have to coordinate times anyway. And, granted, we have three bathrooms (our 150 year old house was a duplex at one point), but we have never run into the problem of people brushing their teeth in the bathroom at the same time. It’s called take freaking turns. It’s what my dad and his twin brother had to do in the 50’s while sharing one bathroom with three sisters. I assumed a schedule was the normal thing!
I know right? I have never considered that a bathroom would need more than one sink.
Haha this is funny because my husband and I would never have thought to look for houses with double sinks, we ended up with just one sink and we always want to use it at the same time and always bump into each other and drive each other nuts.
I must be the only person in the world who dislikes double sinks. You know what a double sink is? Another sink to clean.. The boyfriend can hip check me all he likes.
I know, right??? I feel the exact same way.
Your #1 actually reminds me that waaaay back in the early days of House Hunters, they used to show three homes but they would call them “Home 4” and “Home 7” and “Home “15” – so the buyer would look at a bunch of homes but only show the three most interested on the show, I guess.
Oh god yes all of this. My favorite: on a balcony, “Oh no, that’s a long way down, the kids will fall!” Alternate ending: parent your children.
YES! YES YES YES!!
saw a HH:International ep the other day where a couple turned down a beautiful home because it had a well in it. the well was covered with a glass (plexiglass?) cover. the well had been in the home for several hundred years. also they weren’t comfortable with the very old timey stove that was always hot. the kids could fall in! the kids would put their hands on the stove and get burned. well yes… like ALL KIDS DO… and they would only do it once! and the well was blocked off! im sure they wouldnt be the first children to live in the house. PARENT YOUR KIDS! hell… tell them there’s a monster in the well! that’s how my parents kept me away from the pool-converted-to-pond in our backyard! and it worked! and no im not scarred from the “lie” i love swimming… in clean water
I really wanna play now. Good news for my fellow non-cable-having people: it’s not on Netflix, but it is on Hulu (for those able to access it).
Yess! I was starting to feel nostalgic for cable days, but I’ll totally watch these on hulu.
A side note about the double sink thing—I’m not saying it’s a dealbreaker, or a big deal, but I DO love having a double sink. My husband and I both have a ton of stuff out on the sink, and we DO actually both get ready quite often at the same exact time (we usually shower together, so we’re usually ready for brushing our teeth, doing our hair, etc at the same time). It’s not impossible to do with a single sink, but having a double definitely decreases our odds of accidentally hitting each other (which happens a lot. I’m clumsy). Again, it’s totally not a dealbreaker, but if you’re looking at houses and not totally in love with something, it’s something to put in the “con” column if you actually use both.
I also think you should drink every time the hunter is a single chick with a sassy friend, and the sassy friend makes a huge deal about something no one cares about. “OMG, look at that tile! It’s so dated! I don’t think I could see that every day, could YOU?!”
My husband and I have “double sinks” now, after sharing a tiny bathroom for a long time. They are convenient. I like that I never have to deal with his little hairs in the sink from shaving. It doesn’t bother me when it is on his side 🙂 We also have a separate “Poop Room” off of the bathroom that has just the toilet. While neither of those things is a deal breaker…it really is less stressful getting ready in the morning!
You guys shower together on a regular basis? Are you two some sort of wizards? Whenever my dude and I try to do that one of us ends up looking like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
Wait. WHAT? House Hunters on Hulu? How, what… I didn’t KNOW! Bless your soul, Colleen. You’ve done your good deed for the day and you can slack off now. 🙂
Hulu? What? My days were already jam packed with watching the 15 minute “teasers” on HGTV.com, now they have full ones? Oh, internets, it’s times like these that I love you.
If you want to dominate at the HH game and always pick the one they end up with – choose the house without furniture. Since they already have to have a contract on a house, it’s not going to be the one with furniture in it.
Go back and watch a few episodes. It’s always the empty one.
Now this show will never be the same!
I’ve got nothing new to add other than to applaud Megan’s beer selection Holy Ail FTW.
I discovered it when shopping for beers for my Nerdy 30. It’s now my favorite beer of all time.
I’ve been to the Black Sheep Brewery, I used to live close-ish to it – such a fun tour. You could get right close to everything, at least 10 years ago you could.
…or as it’s known in this example, “LIA YLOH” 😀
shut it! 😉
Yes ma’am 🙂
Ha! I’m actually in the process of applying to be on House Hunters International! And it will be fake as hell! We bought our place over 6 months ago and have been living in it since then. I’m not sure that I would go through with it if we did make the cut, but I’m so curious to see what it’s like. A friend of a friend did it recommended we try, just for the hell of it. I’m mostly curious to find out how they script/prompt what the people (specifically the women) should say. A friend of mine did an episode of “Like It or List It” and she said they pretty much bullied her into being a whiny bitch who didn’t like anything and complained the whole time, when really she was perfectly happy with all the renovations. She was upset about it and nervous for it to air because she didn’t want people to see her that way.
If we get on maybe I’ll write a post about our experience!
One drink for every time someone says, “This would be GREAT for entertaining.”
That’s pretty much in every episode.
HAHA! Great minds. I didn’t see your comment before I posted.
OOH! I have a new rule! 1 drink for any variation of, we love to entertain! This would be great/not-so-great for entertaining. We would like to be able to entertain. Etc. For once I’d love to hear someone say, “This would be the perfect house for one hell of a party!” House Hunters. I love that show.
I always thought I must be from another planet, because I HATE to “entertain” I just don’t like having a bunch of people in my house. My home is refuge, it’s my safe place, it’s MINE…and I don’t want a bunch of people in it. Now I know I’m not the only one, right? RIGHT??
I’m the same way. Well, I like having people over but I like it to be for a relatively short and clearly defined periods of time. But mostly home is my space to be away from other people.
I am exactly the same way about “entertaining,” which is probably why that whole notion sticks out to me so much in the HH world. I like having people over to eat my delicious food and drink some good booze, but after about 1-2 hours I am DONE. Done. I want to take off my bra and stretch out on the couch. Hey… maybe if I did that more often, I’d have more guests? 😉
When I’m looking for a place, I’ll want it to have a situation where the bedrooms are kind of in a different part of the house (another floor or through a hallway with a doorway), because I do love to entertain, but I like my space to be my own.
Every time the agent says “It’s really going to be a challenge to find what they want for the budget they have.
Every time a young couple says “We have to be able to walk to our favorite bars and restaurants.”
My favorite HH episode ever was a really country family shopping in the middle of nowhere. It was really funny. Wish they had more stuff like that.
When the boyfriend and I were house hunting, I was all, “HGTV LIED TO MEEEEEEE!!!”
Are these shows on Hulu, Netflix or Amazon? Cause this is a drinking game I would play.
edit: So I had glazed over half the comments and missed the mention of Hulu. Thank you kindly, a different Colleen!
It looks like House Hunters is available on Hulu
So technically, it appears that you can link from hulu to HGTV’s own website, where their HH archives seem to be stored…but so long as you can do it through an online connection, it should be fine.
When we bought our home my mom (a big HH fan) would text me daily to remind me that I CAN indeed change the paint color/wall paper. No shit, mom! I always find that hilarious that they bring up the wall decor, since that’s usually the first thing people change, anyway!
This is my pet hate with ALL house buying shows. You’re never going to find a completely perfect house and it’s far better to get one where something really minor like the colour needs changing than one where you hate the layout or will want to add rooms.
Then again I already know I’m going to want a house in craxy colours so it’s pretty much a given that I’ll be repainting, even (or especially) if the sellers redecorated the place ready for selling.
It annoys me that they never look at important things like the roof, the heaters, the foundation, the wiring, the windows/insulation. Also, I’d love to hear “we’d get awesome/terrible Internet here!”
My biggest pet peeve is when parents with small children go “Oh, that’s so not safe for the baby!” It seems to be the biggest with pools. “That’s not safe for Little Timmy!” Um, Little Timmy isn’t going to be two forever, and maybe 10-year-old Timmy would LOVE to have a pool in his freaking back yard! Until then, slap a fence up around that puppy! It’s one thing if YOU, the adult, don’t want a pool or something, but don’t make housing decisions based on your toddler!
Even better get the house with the pool and spend some time as a family teaching Little Timmy to swim.
Kids can learn to swim from a very young age (about when they start learning to walk I think) and that way you get a fun activity to do together, don’t have to worry about your kid falling in the pool and you’re teaching them a useful (potentially life saving) skill.
We totally did this with my mom’s best friend’s daughter. She started swimming in our pool before she was 1. By the time she was 4 she could swim in the deep end (albeit with supervision). If you start a young child off with the dunking and when you bring them up, say “Yay! What a good job!” and start clapping, they start getting really excited about swimming.
We had a big in-ground pool growing up, so we had to learn to swim. I think I started lessons when I was two. There was also a fence around the pool. Made the whole pool thing a lot less dangerous.
My mum totally started teaching all of us to swim in the bathtub when we were little. We didn’t have a pool, but our folks went to the quarry all summer long. I don’t know about other places but I know in New Hampshire and Arizona there are actually laws about fencing around pools. If a door leads out to a pool the handle/lock has to be a certain height from the ground and all sorts of silly things.
these sorts of precautions are not silly.
Evee!! Excellent rule and my point exactly! !
Take a drink every time the couple says their (usually an only) child’s name….I saw one episode that every room the couple entered, they commented on how their one-year-old child would enjoy it!!!!!
Ooh ooh, followed by “but we’d have to change the paint color.” Because they’re no WAY their little girl could ever stand to have a BLUE bedroom. THE HORROR!
Haha, I’m so glad you did this. My husband and I have been joking about starting such a drinking game, specifically over the women-need-big-closets, men-need-backyard-space-for-barbecue comments.
Ugh, am I the only one that absolutely hates this show? I can’t stand it, and I don’t think I’ve ever watched an entire episode start to finish. And HGTV always played multiple episodes back to back.
The rules for this drinking game are just stabbing reminders for why this show drives me bonkers.
I just yell angrily at the screen (mostly YOU CAN CHANGE THE PAINT COLOUR, IDIOT) before I quit it and switch to the Food Network (only to find Rachel Ray or Guy Fieri on, so I shut off the TV and sit in grumpy silence, instead.)
I’m a hater.
Seriously!! I hate when they dwell on the things that can be soooo easily changed. My fiance and I have a drinking game for every time one of the house hunters says, “This is nice.” or “This is huge.” or “This is so big!”…well insert dirty mind comments on those too-we are usually laughing like crazy if they say “This is so big” enough times.
Ooh, that’s a whole NEW drinking game. Drink anytime there’s a sexual innuendo. “I’m not sure it’s going to fit,” et al. 😉
Love this. I usually sneak my HH fix at 6 am before or after my morning run, so I probably won’t be drinking (probably) but I love that other folks find it as hilarious as I do.