MAKING IT HOME
Home may be where the heart is, but a new HGTV series beginning next month will prove that it can also be a pain.
A refrigerator blocking the only window in the kitchen. A master bedroom so small even the mattress won’t fit. An oddly shaped loft living room with all the comfort and warmth of a bowling alley.
Those are just a few of the challenges college grads, savvy singles, cohabiting couples and harried families will experience during the weekly half-hour television series “My First Place.”
The show will chronicle the stress, thrills and excitement of first-time homeowners from Denver, Detroit, Miami, Philadelphia and Seattle who were followed as they packed and moved into high-rise condos, co-ops, townhouses, apartments, new houses and “fixer-uppers.”
During each episode, the homeowners will meet with a local designer who, along with a $3,000 design budget, will help them use their own interests or mementoes to design a room and complete simple renovation projects to transform their home.
In the first episode, airing Oct. 22 at 7 p.m., designers helped Melissa Provost and Jonathan Kloster create a fabulous family room that was a mixture of their styles.
“I have it (style), but he didn’t,” says Provost, who had their first home built in Aurora’s southeast Murphy Creek Gulf Course neighborhood.
Their formal living and dining area would have stood empty for several years because the couple had neither the furniture nor the finances in their budget to decorate. But designers used turquoise accents from one of Provost’s floral paintings and pieces of Kloster’s refurbished black lacquer bedroom set from his former bachelor pad to transform the room.
“To have left that room empty would have been so sad because it’s the first thing you see as you walk in the door,” Provost said. “Having that room be done makes it home.”
LEND YOUR SENSES
Lend your eyes, ears and voice to someone who may have use of none of the above as a volunteer for the Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic, Rocky Mountain Unit.
Volunteers are needed to serve as readers, directors, book markers and office assistants, as well as to manage school outreach in several Denver locations.
The organization’s first mission when it was founded in 1951 was to provide recorded textbooks to blind World War II veterans who wanted to attend college under the GI Bill of Rights. Since that time, the mission has grown in scope, with the organization having provided more than 246,000 recorded books to nearly 138,000 individuals from kindergarten youths to graduate-school students who are blind, visually impaired, or learning or physically disabled.
For information, e-mail
betsyrfbd@qwest.net or call 303-757-0787.
– Sheba R. Wheeler
