Last week, I reported to you that the TV show "Clean House" was in St. Louis, and in fact was redoing a house that is in our neighborhood....and we've been stalking the show. It's funny how the new "normal" route to ANYWHERE takes us by this house!
Well, Saturday was the yard sale that goes along with the show, and naturally we were pretty pumped to go to the sale...though I was a bit worried about impulse buys of other people's junk.
The yard sale didn't start in the wee hours of the morning as do most yard sales. Instead, it was scheduled to start at 10:00 AM, which was cutting things close for me, since I had a St. Louis Blogger's Guild meeting at 11:00. Still, you don't want to pass up an opportunity to be on TV, right? So we went.
It was cold. REALLY cold. Although the temperature was slightly above freezing, it was so windy that it was pretty uncomfortable. The yard sale was moved to a Knights of Columbus hall near the house that was being redone, and crowds of people lined up outside. Eventually, one of the producers or production assistants came out and said that they were a little behind, but that things would get going shortly.
I started worrying about getting to my meeting.
Finally, to help keep the crowd enthused, they started talking to everyone in line.
"How are you all doing?" they yelled.
"COLD!!!!!!" came back the unanimous...and loud...response.
Soon, Mark Brunetz and Trish Suhr, two of the hosts of the show came running outside to wind people up even more as can be seen in the above photo. Trish is behind Mark. She's small.
Niecy Nash, the hostess, came out and recorded a couple of bits for the show. Soon we'd be going in!
They informed us that due to the size of the building, only 75 people or so could be inside at a time. A quick count of the crowd put us WELL into the second group of 75. Bummer. I knew I was going to miss going in, due to my meeting. I started calculating that I had a 10 minute walk home, then a 10 minute drive to the meeting.
Things were getting tight!
However, once they started letting people in the building, many people came out disappointed. Apparently, one of the messiest homes in America didn't have a lot of good stuff they wanted to sell.
This was actually GOOD, from my perspective.
I didn't want to be buying anything...though I brought cash for the kids and in the slim hope that there would be some old LPs or video games inside. My dream find would be an old, underpriced guitar!
The line started moving pretty good, so I decided to be late for my meeting for this once in a blue moon chance to see a show I actually enjoyed being filmed and meet the hosts. As you can see in the picture (above and left), I am texting Dana (sorry guys!) at the Blogger's Guild to say I'm going to be late as I'm stuck at the filming. I'm all hi-tech and stuff! Perhaps "stuck" was a strong word to use, but I could tell that this was my chance to see this show in action.
Once inside the building, I ran around trying to get pictures of the hosts, which was tricky due to crowds and VERY dim lighting...plus a "no flash" rule from the TV show people.
It was very interesting meeting the hosts and seeing them in action. Niecy was just as over-the-top as you see on TV and her grandmother was even there (she has spent a portion of her life living in St. Louis). There were many autograph seekers and lots of fans. In fact, I had assumed everyone there had known about the TV show, but it seemed that at least half didn't know anything about it being there, or even had heard of the show.
The photo above is my favorite of Niecy, though it is still a bit blurry. She had hugs for everyone!
Eventually, my family made their way over to Trish - the Yard Sale Diva. Trish had some great stories about a monkey - a real monkey - that lives in the house they are redoing. She's a great story-teller! Luckily, they got some of the wacky interactions between Trish and the monkey on tape, and it should be hilarious on the show. Can't wait to see it.
My youngest daughter, Rachel, had found a couple of tennis rackets she wanted to get (she's been talking about playing tennis with my wife, Dianne, for much of the past 6 months) and she asked Trish about pricing and got a ticket written up for he (see the picture above).
All in all, even though the yard sale didn't have too much interesting stuff, it turned out to be well worth the effort meeting the hosts. It was a lot of fun!
We're STILL stalking the house they are working in, too.
How fun! I will keep a lookout for a guitar for you.
Posted by: Kim | February 17, 2009 at 04:03 PM
Very cool!!
Posted by: zookeeper | February 18, 2009 at 09:34 AM
Is the flower real or well preserved?
Did you say you liked being filmed? Hmm, you didn't like it when I filmed you...but then again, maybe your "film star" nametag has more credibility now than it did before!
Posted by: Larry | February 18, 2009 at 10:38 PM
...forgot to mention...we watched "Clean House" for the first time tonight, motivated by your prior entry...interesting show. I'm still inconvenienced by the street closure though...makes getting to basketball practice at Gethsemane a bit harder.
Posted by: Larry | February 18, 2009 at 10:40 PM
How long does it take them to do a house? on the show, it seems like 2 days. I just finished watching 2 episodes, did a google search and found your blog!
Posted by: Toni | January 18, 2010 at 02:27 PM
Basically a week. They were out of there just a day or two after the yard sale, and some staff arrived a few days before that week. The crews basically worked around the clock, though!
Posted by: Gregg | January 18, 2010 at 03:34 PM
Hey How Do You Enter A Clean House YARD SALE ?
Posted by: RiRi | August 08, 2010 at 10:55 AM