Top secret chic
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Tanya Coovadia and daughter Darwin, 7 months, relax in the sound studio created out of a guest room by the crew of While You Were Out for husband Adam, who plays guitar and keyboards and writes music. “He’s been working so hard” at his job as a cytogenetic technologist, Tanya said. “I wanted to remind him how to play.”
[Times photo: Chris Zuppa]
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By JUDY STARK, Times Homes Editor
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 1, 2003
Three St. Petersburg families will appear soon on TLC's While You Were Out. So, how did their room makeovers turn out? That's classified.
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Who says some people can't keep a secret?
It's just amazing how many people in the Tampa Bay area (and even in Canada) knew that three families in St. Petersburg had been selected to appear on the popular TLC home makeover show While You Were Out and kept it to themselves for two months.
Relatives, friends and employers knew well in advance of the taping in early January. But the three unknowing participants -- two husbands and a mother, who were packed out of town while a room in each of their homes was remodeled -- were the last to know.
They're the ones the cameras focused on at "the reveal," that moment of truth at the end when they returned to see the decorating magic that had been worked while they were out. And they were all surprised.
We're not going to tell you whether Vicky Jones, 51, liked the Victorian parlor created out of the trashed teen party room in her garage while she was off with husband Mark in St. Augustine. We won't reveal whether full-time cytogenic technologist and sometime musician/songwriter Adam Coovadia, 27, was rocked or shocked at the way a guest room was transformed into a sound lab while he was meeting an old friend and fellow Canadian in Miami. And our lips are sealed about how Carlos Mendez reacted when he got back from a weekend camping trip in the Everglades and saw the Puerto Rican casita that was built in his back yard.
For those reactions, you'll have to watch the shows, which will air at 9 p.m. Friday and March 14 and 21 on TLC. Reruns of earlier shows are on at 8. The show attracts a prime time audience of 4.5-million viewers.
The daughter and two wives who worked with the While You Were Out design team all said keeping the secret was hard.
"It was not like me at all to keep anything from Adam. Usually I bore him with the most mundane details of my day," said Tanya Coovadia, who calls herself the 30-something stay-at-home mom of a 7-month-old daughter, Darwin. "Keeping something like this from him was big. But I told everybody else. Most of them are in Toronto -- we're from Ontario -- so I was able to tell all of them with relative impunity." Local friends, she said, "I didn't tell until the very last minute."
Sitting on the secret was hard, too, for Barbara Mendez, 45, who does computer forensic work for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Like the other local homeowners, she applied on the show's Web site and got a phone call from producer Amanda Karrh. Between 50 and 75 homeowners in the Tampa Bay area applied to be on the show, Karrh said (typically the show gets between 50 and 300 applicants when it announces it's coming into a city). Karrh checked out 10 potential homes when she visited here around Thanksgiving, also videotaping the homeowners to see how they came across on camera. She chose these three, she said, because they presented very different projects and because of the diversity of a Puerto Rican theme and the homeowners' lives and personalities.
[Times photo: Dirk Shadd]
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Barbara Mendez, with son Mike, left, daughter Rachel, right, and Microchip, the family Yorkie, sit on the steps of the Puerto Rican casita built by While You Were Out in their back yard. Barbara hopes the casita will get husband Carlos more interested in outdoor living.
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At every step of the way, Mendez said, she wanted to let Carlos know: "The producer called!" or "We're semifinalists!" or "They're coming!" But she had to bite her tongue, or share the news with kids Rachel, 18, Mike, 16, and Efrain, 25. When Karrh was scheduled to visit, Carlos asked why Barbara was cleaning house on a different day of the week from her usual schedule, "and I was bursting to say something," she recalled.
The show's crew totals about 17, including host Teresa Strasser, carpenters Leslie Segrete and Andrew Dan-Jumbo, a designer for each project (John Bruce did the Victorian parlor and the sound studio; Mayita Dinos did the casita), and production staff: makeup, sound, camera, caterers. They set up tents in the front yard to shelter tools, supplies and a carpentry shop. Caterers take over the kitchen. A bathroom becomes a makeup studio.
"They totally took over the house," said Angel Lee, 24, who, like her mother, Vicky Jones, teaches at Community Christian School in Largo and had to arrange with school officials for her mother to get time off midweek. (Lee cooked up a story that she had won a two-night stay at a bed and breakfast in St. Augustine and wanted to give it to her mother and stepfather as the honeymoon they never had.) During the taping, "I was very busy, very tired. A lot of times I felt useless," she said. The crew "have their schedule, and I just said, 'I'm here if you need me.' "
"They descended on my house like a flock of industrious vultures," Tanya Coovadia recalled. "They came in, laid down protective matting on the floor and took over my house. They commandeered the baby's room as a place to store cameras, the bedroom as the makeup room. They do take over."
She was concerned when "they basically sprang on me that Darwin would have to be out of the house for 12 hours a day. But I waved Darwin at them and they found her hypnotic: THIS IS A BEAUTIFUL BABY. SHE CAN DO WHATEVER SHE WANTS." Tanya did get two friends to watch Darwin so she could work with the cast and create some of the hands-on projects that are a regular feature of the show.
[TLC ]
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The While You Were Out crew totals about 17, including host Teresa Strasser.
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A taping usually takes three days: one to shop, two to work. Before the crew arrives in town, the designer studies the floor plans and videotape of the home the producer brings back from a site visit and has the project mapped out, incorporating the homeowner's desires, interests, and style and color preferences.
Unlike the sister show Trading Spaces, on which some designers push hard for the unusual and sometimes bizarre, While You Were Out seems to want to satisfy the homeowners' wishes. The producers asked Lee to rip pages out of a magazine to show what she liked or didn't. They asked about her mother's favorite colors. "They asked me questions about what she'd love or hate: 'Would she like this?' 'Is there anything we should not do?' 'Is there anything you think she would hate?' "
The show is sponsored by Home Depot, so one consideration in choosing projects is proximity to a store. The show buys virtually all materials and products locally to cut down on shipping expenses, and producers will quiz homeowners on the proximity of fabric stores, sources of accessories and furnishings, even thrift shops (some of the chairs reupholstered for Jones' Victorian parlor came from the Salvation Army). The budget: $1,500 for interior projects and $1,800 for outdoor projects.
On a bright, sunny Saturday in January, the crew was at the Mendez house, a 40-year-old ranch. It was the end of a nonstop week, after completion of the Lee/Jones and Coovadia projects, and people were tired. Carpenter Segrete pitched a small hissy fit off camera when she found someone had moved her tools. Host Strasser was trying to do a standup to introduce a segment showing Carlos Mendez on his camping trip in the Everglades and kept blowing her lines, followed by exclamations of, "Oh, s--! Oh, s--!" She apologized profusely to Will, 8, and Christine, 12, the children of St. Petersburg City Council member Bill Foster, who had stopped by to watch the taping. The kids, like their parents, are ardent fans of the show.
"I don't have a full picture" of what the project is going to look like, Barbara Mendez acknowledged as the crew swarmed around her back yard. She's half Puerto Rican, half Cuban, and grew up in New York. Husband Carlos, 46, who works in customer service at Maher Chevrolet, was born in Puerto Rico, "and he misses it so much," Barbara said. So landscape designer Mayita Dinos, who also is Puerto Rican, planned to create an outdoor pavilion reminiscent of the casitas of Puerto Rico, "little houses in the hills, brightly painted, that use materials ingeniously. They're the Puerto Rico of a long time ago." She planned to create a chair hammock and add plants typical of the gardens around a casita, both ornamentals and fruits and vegetables: "very useful gardens."
Outside, carpenter Dan-Jumbo was working on the frame for the casita. "Mayita asks for the impossible," he said cheerfully. He estimated that the crews are able to complete about 75 percent of what the designers ask for at the outset, "and we have to squeeze every minute out of each day to finish." (The homeowners commented on the long hours the crew puts in: "They were there till 9:30 the first night," Lee remembered. "They didn't knock off because it was 5 o'clock.") Sometimes, Dan-Jumbo said, things don't get painted because the crew just runs out of time: The absent partner is due back, and they have to go with what they've got. But he insisted that "structurally, my No. 1 concern is safety."
[Times photo: Cherie Diez ]
Angel Lee relaxes in the Victorian garden parlor created for her mother, Vicky Jones, out of what was once a teen party room Lee and her brother Clinton, 21, “used and abused.”.
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The three homeowners were pleased with the quality of the work. "Beautiful craftsmanship, sturdy, very useful, dynamic," Tanya Coovadia said. "They even asked how tall Adam was before they finished designing the desk. It's really professional, beautiful work." Lee was happy with "the really good-quality furniture wood, like name-brand designer stuff." The crew didn't have time to put up all the chair rail or to finish the painting on the mantel or the walls on her project, but they left behind materials and instructions and called two days later and again a week later to make sure Lee had been able to finish the work without difficulty.
As for the moment of truth, when the absent person walks in the door: "They kicked me out of the room three hours before Adam was supposed to be home. They worked up until the last second, hammering, scurrying around, yelling," Coovadia said. She used to think the reveals were staged, "but it's not. It's really impressive."
At the Lee-Jones house, "They told me it was one of the more dramatic reveals," Lee said. Host Strasser, who admits that sometimes she likes the projects better than the homeowners, or vice versa, said the Lee-Jones Victorian makeover is one for which she has a soft spot in her heart.
At the Mendez household, well, let's just say that Carlos was paying attention to the traffic in his neighborhood before he pulled into his driveway and a telltale truck may have given him a clue of what awaited. The afternoon before, Barbara had her fingers crossed: "I hope he'll be as excited as I am."
Watching the shows
The three local projects will be broadcast on TLC:
9 p.m. Friday: Adam and Tanya Coovadia's guest room becomes a sound studio for musician Adam.
9 p.m. March 14: The trashed teen party room of Angel Lee's youth becomes a Victorian parlor for her mother, Vicky Jones.
9 p.m. March 21: Barbara Mendez wants to create a back yard living space, reminiscent of the casitas of husband Carlos' Puerto Rican background.
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