Take one man with eight children at home, and one man with three grown sons, and you've got two men who understand the issue of housing an expanding family. That's at the heart of HGTV's new Saturday-night series Outgrown.
It's a spin-off of the network's hit Boise Boys, which profiles house-flippers Luke Caldwell and Clint Robertson of the company Timber and Love, as they rehab homes to sell in and around the Idaho capitol.
Designer Caldwell has the larger family (three biological and five adopted), along with cool hair/glasses and skinny jeans -- making him look remarkably like a megachurch pastor (or a Christian Contemporary Music performer, which he is, as lead singer of the worship band Esterlyn).
The Boise native is odd-coupled with Texas-born licensed contractor/developer Robertson, who's also a business attorney, CPA, licensed mediator, serial entrepreneur and former finalist on The Apprentice.
They parlayed their business of flipping houses for profit in the hot Boise real-estate market into TV success. These days, though, houses to flip are harder to come by.
From the Norada Real Estate Investments blog:
The Boise housing market is sizzling hot and is being fueled by low mortgage rates and limited supply compared to demand. The result is that buyers have to pay over the asking price. Boise’s metro area's median sales price hit a new record of $510,000 in August 2021. That’s a 34% increase from last year. Boise is now the nation’s most overvalued market, where homes are selling for 80.64 percent more than they should, based on a history of past pricing, according to a new report published by the Real Estate Initiative At Florida Atlantic University.
Of course, that also means that growing Boise families needing more space are finding it hard to locate and afford new digs. And, sometimes, people don't want to leave family or beloved neighborhoods to get an extra bathroom or a larger kitchen. So, HGTV and the Boise Boys pivoted.
In each one-hour installment of the 10-episode series Outgrown, they focus on a family that's squeezed into a too-small and/or poorly designed space, and completely redo the home.
Here's a recent report from local TV station KTVB:
Although it's not discussed much (or hardly at all) in the show, both partners are Christians. As I said above, Caldwell sings in a worship band, and Robertson features a Bible verse as one of the pictures on his homepage, with Faith listed as a pillar of his life.
They join other Christian home-remodeling stars on HGTV, most notably Chip and Joanna Gaines of Fixer Upper and their own Magnolia network, and Ben and Erin Napier of Home Town (which I wrote about here).
There's also Christian author/blogger Jen Hatmaker, who did My Big Family Renovation, which turned into Your Big Family Renovation. These shows paved the way for Outgrown, since Hatmaker and husband Brandon (with a family of seven) also have been helping growing clans get more elbow room.
While a lot of HGTV features upscale dwellings and vacation homes in faraway places, at least for these Christian reality-show stars, the focus is on hearth and home.
Outgrown premiered Sept. 18 and currently airs Saturdays on HGTV; it's expected to move to streamer Discovery+ in the near future.
Image: HGTV
Kate O’Hare, a longtime entertainment journalist, is Social Media Content Manager at Family Theater Productions.
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