I wrote in my Spelling Bee post on Thursday that I was pretty certain I didn’t win the contest to get paid $1000 to watch home improvement shows. I wrote this as my submission essay on April 11, 2021.

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“You like home improvement, home improvement shows, and you like to write!” said my fiancee this morning as we drove around to scout out possible outdoor venues. “When we get home, write to them,” she insisted. So here I am, hammering away at my computer, in the living room of our 1+1, much-postponed wedding finally on the horizon.

In most aspects of my life, I like to take things that are distressed and make them shine. I do that in my professional life as an accountant who specializes in bringing startups from something cobbled together (think: Tarek El-Moussa saying, “This whole place has been trashed–and there’s no way this add-on is permitted.”) to being something investors care about (think: the end of every episode of every show in this list). In my personal life, I like to scope the free stuff section on craigslist and take pieces of furniture that look pretty grim (think: every kitchen that’s way too narrow and doesn’t have an island) and turn it into something usable (the end of every episode). I even document my progress in weekly installments on my ThatShipHasSunk blog.

After our wedding this summer, my fiancee and I will be looking to get out of this place where the kitchen drawers are much too tall and vertical blinds fall off when someone sneezes and where I have to stop in the middle of writing this to pull out the staple gun to fix an unsupported chipboard drawer bottom (sure, fixing stuff is fun, but having to do so because knives are falling into a cabinet isn’t). The shows we watch give us insight into what we can do and what we might want to do in a place of our own. We each like to cook and bake, so the kitchen ideas from all the shows give us inspiration on how to have a functioning kitchen where we can work in tandem. Also advice on how to structure our bedroom so that we can have the storage we want while keeping our shins free from bruises is never unappreciated.

“A website is offering $1,000 for someone to binge-watch home improvement shows,” I read to my fiancee as we took the turns of Mulholland Drive in her Nissan Versa, and I continued the CNN article my dad sent to me. “Really, do it.” As though I needed all the convincing.