I don’t watch home renovation shows.
That’s probably a weird place to start a story about making one. But here we are.
We built a house, we built a show, and we tried to do it without manufacturing the messy bits.
For me, the experiment wasn’t, Can we make a reality show? It was, Can we make something real and let that be enough?
There were compromises. There were partners to integrate. We had real responsibilities to the brands helping make the show possible. But the rule we clung to was simple: if it didn’t serve the story, we didn’t do it.
We wanted the partnerships to belong in the story, not interrupt it. That meant understanding the products, listening to the people behind them, and finding the moments where they genuinely mattered to the house we were building.
And the production itself? That was another experiment entirely.
We built the house in real time and documented it in real time. I was only on location five or six times. So we leaned on a village: Allen shooting on the ground, Shannon building the house and becoming a surprise producer along the way, scattered phone calls, and a scrappy shared Apple Notes document that somehow kept us all rowing in the same direction.
We couldn’t script what happened next. We could only stay close enough to recognize a story when it happened.
And then there was that night.
I was lying in bed next to my wife, proofing episode two on my phone. Somewhere along the way, I forgot I was working.
I wasn’t looking for edit notes. I wasn’t thinking about what we’d missed or what we still needed to fix.
I was just watching. Entertained. Curious about what happened next.
And I thought, I think we actually did it.
That’s the kind of real I’m proud of.
For the first time, I wasn’t watching something we’d made. I was watching a show, and I couldn’t wait to see what happened next.
