Fred Kidd

I have a degree in preservation and interior design. My husband has one in architecture. We have watched several shows and the one thing that she needs to do is take a class in architecture history. There are shows where she calls late Victorian Arts n Crafts. Two totally different time periods in history. There was one in Ukraine Village that she put an English door with lots of carving as a pantry door. The door not only was wrong for the period of the house but she had a 1920's sink in the bathroom and told the potential buyers that it was original. First of all the house was built in 1891. And the sink that was in that bathroom when she first purchased the house was not originally a bathroom sink. It was called a scrub sink and would have been used in a kitchen. People that watch these shows watch them thinking that the people doing the renovations have some what of an experience and knowledge of what they are doing when rehabing a historic house. And they show their lack of by talking about things they don't know to those of us who know better. If you don't know, do some research before talking about it or don't mention it at all. And one other thing, she should take more direction from her business partner when it comes to budgets. She took a townhouse that had been rehabed wrongly and spent way too much money on it taking out a bay, glass block walls and then having the garage roof have leaking issues with a high dollar repair cost. It would have been extremely easy and inexpensive to have given it a Deco look which it already had a lot of the Deco traits like the bay window in front and the glass block window wall in the basement. She could have placed a round window in the dining room instead of the picture window, left the bag in the living room as the picture window she placed there didn't look right. It was embarrassing to watch her have to take a house off the market after it sat for two months with no offers. And it gives the appearance of an amateur.