‘Property Brothers’ could adopt the Wilson kids
My kids love interior design.
All four of them, ages 2-8, audibly cheer whenever we turn on an episode of HGTV’s “Property Brothers.” They love watching Jonathan and Drew Scott demolish old houses, and they love sharing their own opinions about how they should lay out and decorate the refurbished spaces.
Some of their real comments from recent viewings:
Five-year-old-daughter: “Those cabinets are too dark. The kitchen needs to be brighter.”
Six-year-old son: “I like the flow of this house. Jonathan could make it work.”
Two-year-old son: “Smash! Boom! Ow!” - during a demolition scene.
The kids refer to Jonathan and Drew as if they’re real people they know. Jonathan might be my five-year-old’s best friend. Whenever he does something silly, she shakes her head, smiles and says, “Oh, Jonathan.” Hearing a five-year-old repeatedly refer to someone with a name as formal as “Jonathan” is just adorable to me for some reason.
She’s got a casual rapport with Jonathan too, and because she considers herself a close friend, she doesn’t mince words with him. When we recently watched an early, season one episode of the show, she couldn’t restrain her opinion on Jonathan’s bleach-tipped hairstyle.
“Jonathan, that hair is horrible! I just can’t!”
The kids sometimes spend hours of the day “remodeling” the boys’ room into a house that accommodates all four of them. They use toys and storage boxes to wall off certain areas for individual bedrooms. They frequently relocate the plastic play kitchen and rearrange their kid recliners so as to maximize the space for “entertaining.”
The two-year-old usually just dumps toys out all over the room for the others to clean. He prefers the demolition part of the game.
They love elegant spaces. Unfortunately, their parents have terrible design instincts. I want to fill rooms with Funko Pops and my wife spends most of her energy reining in all my hoarding impulses.
We’re also just bad with managing home projects. It takes us forever to get anything done because we usually need to watch about 90 “how-to” videos on YouTube before we feel confident to even attempt a project.
This past weekend, my wife and I spent three hours trying to install a curtain rod in the boys’ room. We couldn’t find the right size drill bits, the stud finder kept glitching and I had to spend half the time scouring the garage floor for an essential piece I misplaced weeks earlier when I opened the box.
I should also note that we’ve lived in the house for four years, and rather than installing a simple rod, we’ve been using thumb tacks to pin blackout curtains against the windows to block out the morning sunlight and extend their sleeping time (even with a pitch-black room, they still wake up at the crack of dawn 75 percent of the time).
Throughout the project, the kids kept coming into the room with their critiques.
“You’re STILL hanging that one part?”
(Response: Why don’t you try it!)
“Why is it taking so long? It doesn’t take Jonathan this long.”
(Response: Jonathan has a team on contractors doing all the work for him!)
“I don’t think that looks level.”
(Response: You’re not level!)
“Wow! High!” - The two-year-old liked that we were standing on the kitchen chairs in order to install the rod. He’s going to do something naughty later.
We screamed at all of them several times to leave us alone, then we bickered at each other about our general incompetence. Once we finally finished, my six-year-old son beamed with excitement at the sight of curtains hanging in his room (The image is of a mountain and a lush forest - not exactly Jonathan’s preferred mid-Century modern style). He was more excited about curtains than he was about his new bike last Christmas.
Eight-year-old daughter: “Eh, honestly I thought it would look better.”
Two-year-old son: “High!” He’s standing on top of the kitchen chair in the room, pulling on the curtains.
Don’t pull on them, kids. They definitely aren’t installed properly.