LIFE UNDER RENOVATION: It’s All On The Line

Have you ever watched yourself on TV before?

It’s an odd experience. You spend months, behind the scenes recording hundreds upon hundreds of hours of footage, good stuff. Real stuff.

Stuff where you cry.

Stuff where you are just downright hilarious.

Like laughing at yourself so hard you pee a little kind of funny, and you think to yourself this is going to make some great tv.

Except it doesn’t. It dies on a hard drive somewhere never to be seen again, hell maybe it was never seen the first time, as it didn’t make it to the cutting room, let alone past it.

Watching whole days of filming turn into 2.3 seconds on the screen is a wild experience, and an exercise in… something? futility maybe? I don’t know. I’m learning something from it. I think I’ll have to get back to you about what exactly that something is.

Katherine and Nick North watching the first episode of Life Under Renovation with their five kids.

Alright so picture us, all piled into my office, the seven of us sprawled across some combinations of my corduroy love seat, and snuggled on the floor.

The show starts. The Discovery+ logo makes that fun sound and zooms across the screen.

Just like that it begins. “Every year, 2 Million Americans renovate their homes,” starts the narrator, the music is intense. The cinematography is beautiful, “it’s one of the most stressful” she carries on ”YOU’RE PULLING OUR HOUSE APART!” interrupts Katherine with a shriek. And there we are.

Our family flashes across the screen.

Chris North on giving an interview about our family’s move to Salt Spring Island

It’s all a quick blur, I’m showing off my bald spots and legit pulling our brand new (to us), but very old, falling down Sunroom apart with just my fingers. Will, my favourite character from the show is using adorable Georgian words like Hoodwinked. The McAllisters are showing us up hard with 8 kids to our 5, and the shade that Michelle is throwing at Big Mike is making my life.

The North family in Nick’s New Suncoast Enclosures Office watching Life Under Renovation on Discovery+

I look around and all our hearts are racing! Our eyes focused. We lived through it once, and even still, I can hear Mayhem gasp, “Oh no! Do you think we’re going to make it?”

Spoiler alert. We made it!

ha ha!

I guess what I’m saying is that our family is completely bought into this look at 5 different families stories being woven together to show just how intense it is to live your life under renovation.

I can’t wait for you to see just how bad this place was, and how incredibly buff, and bruised I got doing so much construction!

In Episode 2 of Life Under Renovation on HGTV our family is introduced.

You get to learn all about our family, our move to Salt Spring Island, and how we bought this quirky little chalet site unseen, over the internet, in a bidding war, during a pandemic. We show you our falling down sunroom, and you even get a quick shot of me working in the hobbit hole, which we now call the cellar. This office is so much better than the spooky, windowless hobbit hole I was working in.

Episode 2 Here. We. Go.