The Why the Heck Did I Buy This House? homes are staged, but everything else about the show seems fairly legitimate.
Buyer’s remorse is all too real, but getting past this issue is not as easy as simply returning a purchase.
The HGTV show, Why the Heck Did I Buy This House? which is hosted by the former Survivor winner, Kim Wolfe, helps homeowners all over the San Antonio area to fall in love with their fixer upper homes.
Is Why the Heck Did I Buy This House? real?
And though HGTV and its lineup of home renovation shows have come under fire in the past for playing up certain aspects for the cameras, this show and its creative renovation solutions seem as real as they could possibly be.
Furthermore, it features real homeowners who receive very real renovation tips and professional help throughout each project.
Why the Heck Did I Buy This House? in a nutshell
Two seasons of Why the Heck Did I Buy This House? have been confirmed thus far. These two seasons can be summarized as follows:
| Season | Total episodes | Premiere date |
| Season 1 | 7 | March 30, 2022 |
| Season 2 | 7 | December 26, 2023 |
The show is based on Kim Wolfe’s real-life experiences
While most of the home design and home renovation shows that you see on HGTV feature expert designers with years of experience in the field, Wolfe is actually a self-taught designer whose show hits close to home.
Unfortunately, Wolfe draws from her own experience very often on Why the Heck Did I Buy This House?, as the entire premise of the show is actually based on her real-life fixer upper struggles.
Apparently, Wolfe spent her hard-earned $1 million Survivor winnings on a 1940s home.
But since this was Wolfe and her husband, Bryan’s first home, and the fixer upper needed a lot of fixing up, Wolfe learned many difficult lessons about renovation and design along the way.
Wolfe still credits this no-doubt challenging first solo design project as the beginning of her design-addiction, and it did not take long for her to start looking elsewhere for new projects once they were settled.
So at the very least, we do know that Wolfe’s sympathies and advise for the Why the Heck Did I Buy This House? homeowners come from a very genuine place.
Why the Heck Did I Buy This House? is still a television show
All signs may point to Why the Heck Did I Buy This House? being one of the real-er home renovation shows on television, but it is still a television show.
And in the home renovation and design genre, this means that the ‘final product’ that we see at the end of each episode does not necessarily remain that way when the camera crew hits the road.
Why the Heck Did I Buy This House?, just like most of the other shows that you may watch regularly on HGTV, stages its homes for the camera.
And while homeowners usually have the option to buy the furniture and decorations which are used for staging (after the fact), the items which are not purchased will usually be removed from the home, leaving just permanent fixtures, paint and flooring intact.
In fact, Wolfe even held a warehouse sale in her former auto body property after the filming of the most recent season of the show wrapped to get rid of some of the things that they used to stage the Why the Heck Did I Buy This House? projects on the show.
How the show selects its next projects
One of the most important factors to consider when you are determining whether a home renovation show is really as real as it promises to be is whether it showcases the houses of real people.
And it seems like Why the Heck Did I Buy This House? is in the clear on this one. When the show was first starting out, all of the houses which Wolfe renovated were located within just a few miles of each other.
But the series has now expanded Wolfe has stayed close to her real-life roots in San Antonio. A casting announcement from Wolfe’s Instagram account back in 2022 even asked San Antonio residents to contact the show if they were “ready to remodel”.
Wolfe has also explained that they carefully select the homeowners who get to have their homes expertly remodeled for the show by weeding through these real-life applicants to find the ones that have a “clear thing that they fell in love with” in their homes.
Though the homeowners do still need to tick many other boxes along the way.
