Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Extreme Home Makeover

All last week the ABC show Extreme Home Makeover was in the downtown Gainesville area re-doing a house. The family had dedicated their life to teaching music to underprivileged children and spent ALL their money on a music school, neglecting their own home. Five Gainesville families were on the list as of last Monday and on Monday morning, Dec 7th, this family heard the big news from Ty Pennington himself. They then were sent off on a vacation and the Gainesville community worked to bull doze the house and re-build a new one. The big "Move that Bus!" was this past Monday afternoon, Dec 14th.

Here's a picture of the house on Sunday afternoon. It's almost done!

David and I were able to go down to the site on Sunday afternoon. The site was open to the public for anyone to see, but our friend Lance who works for a local advertising agency was a sponsor of the project so we got VIP passes. Unfortunately, that didn't really mean anything other than there was a tent with food in it for us. We didn't get to go in the house or anything, but it was pretty cool from the outside.

Here we are with our VIP passes!

While we were there they shot one of the sessions, which was pretty cool to see. Ty ran out of the house to announce that some furniture had arrived and it was time to unload. They had to shoot that twice! Then, the entire Gator Marching Band, Albert & Alberta, and the Gator Cheerleaders marched down the street to the Gator Fight song with the furniture truck following behind them. Ty and 3 other designers dramatically moved the furniture out of the truck and into the house, along with some of the UF Basketball players who got to help. After all the moving was said and done the producers got on a loud speaker and said, "Well for the first time, that was a wrap! No need to shoot it again." If they hadn't gotten the coverage they needed, the entire furniture truck would have been loaded up again and everyone would have had to march down the street for a second take. Luckily they got it in one shoot! Check out the pictures below!

Here's Ty after his second shoot of announcing that the furniture truck was on it's way!

Ty and the 3 other designers waiting to unload the truck!

Here comes Albert, Alberta and the cheerleaders!

Then, the Gator Marching Band!

Unload that truck!
I have some great video of pillows being thrown out of the truck with the Fight Song playing in the background, but it was taking way to long to upload so a picture will have to suffice! :)

Here is a picture of me with Paulie. You can really see all that baby fat in this picture of me! Eeek!

It was so fun to get to watch some of this project unfold. The show should air sometime in February, I think. I can't wait to watch it!

1 comment:

Aimee Reeves said...

Hey, no fair you guys got VIP passes!! We saw Lance on Monday and he didn't do that for us...guess we aren't as cool as you guys! LOL!! I was there on Sunday as well and saw all of that..it was fun, but not close ups like you have!:) You are lucky!!