Here’s an 
article I wrote for State College Magazine.
Extreme Work, Extreme Reward
September 2010
By: Kimberly Del Bright
Reality TV Finds a Local Interior Designer Who Finds Joy in Helping Others Makeover House
Interior designer Kate Kissell is on the phone, searching for something on which she can take notes. That scrap of blackout lining and a permanent marker will have to do–she needs to get this down. It’s not every day you get a call from a television producer wanting to feature your work.
On the other end of the line is Ann Cummings, a producer with the ABC reality TV show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” and she’s looking for a team leader for an upcoming episode. The show, which airs locally on Sunday nights, is a rags-to-riches American story of hope that features host Ty Pennington and a celebrity design team including Tracy Hutson and Paul DiMeo.
The show selects a struggling family, sends them on vacation and then moves in a community of volunteers who work frantically to replace their existing home with a brand new one. The home is then stuffed with new furnishings and accessories, right down to the fresh fruit bowl and new clothes in the closets, and the whole transformation is accomplished in 106 hours. Tears flow and hugs abound at the end of each episode as the family returns and tours their new home.
Kissell, who owns Picadilly Interiors in State College, was recommended by Margie Nance, a design instructor in Charlotte, N.C., Cummings often turns to for suggestions. Cummings told Nance she needed someone in Pennsylvania with extensive knowledge of fabrication and design. “I’ve got the perfect person. This girl knows it all,” Nance said.
Fast-forward an hour, and Kissell is on the phone with Cummings, struggling with that scrap of curtain lining. Cummings emphasized the big undertaking she was asking of Kissell, but that the most important thing is the job gets done with a positive attitude. “It has to be fun, and if it’s not, call me, and we’ll fix it,” Cummings told her. That struck a chord with Kissell, who is connected to her church. “Just like mission work–where’s your heart in this? If you’re not going to have a good time with it, then move out of the way, and let someone else do it,” Kissell says.
It wasn’t hard for Kissell to find her heart in the work. Cummings asked her to coordinate the soft coverings–pillows, quilts, curtains and some upholstery–for the interior of a home the show intended to build in Berks County for a young widow and her 18-month-old daughter. Their story would tug on even the most hardened of hearts: Trisha and Andy Urban were refurbishing their decrepit, 300-year-old cabin in Hamburg and awaiting the birth of their first child in early 2009. When Trisha went into labor on Feb. 4, Andy went out to check on the family’s goats and horses before taking her to the hospital. But when he didn’t return from the barn, Trisha found him by the family’s front gate; he had died of a massive heart attack brought on by a congenital heart defect. Andy, who didn’t have health insurance because the defect was considered a pre-existing condition, had skipped an appointment with his cardiologist the week before for fear of pushing the family deeper into debt.
Later that day, Trisha gave birth to Cora. Mounting debt and increasing responsibilities put a stop to the home renovations, although a community effort last year did raise enough funds for Trisha to buy the house back from Andy’s estate, since he died without a will in place.
In June, that community effort manifested into something much more extreme when show producers called local volunteers to let them know the Urban house had been chosen for “Extreme Makeover,” and a few months later, Kissell was there to see it from behind the scenes.
After the phone call, Kissell set to work getting ready for her trip to Berks County. Cummings charged her with finding a crew of fabricators and upholsterers and sources for fabrics, hardware and supplies. Finding sources willing to donate or heavily discount the materials is essential to paying for the project, which is organized by a local group under the “Extreme Makeover” umbrella–in the Urbans’ case, the Home Builders Association of Berks County took the fundraising lead. Two days before the reveal of the home to the family, spokesman Jeff Woytovich said enough money had been raised to ensure Trisha would have the same mortgage she had prior to the project.
“Extreme Makeover” has been criticized in the past for building excessively lavish homes that put financial burdens on the recipients. The Urban family home was purposely modestly sized at 2,700 square feet and emphasized a whimsical fairytale theme over the extravagant trappings of homes of past seasons that had such features as bowling alleys and pools–although the family goats in this project did receive their own “goat hotel.” Instead, the Urban home featured a fence and a fireplace mantel made from repurposed cherry wood from the original house, and according to associate producer Josh Ziln, more than one third of the power for the house will be generated from the attractive stone-and-metal wind turbine gracing the front lawn, and additional power will be supplied through solar panels in the front yard.
Woytovich says Urban will also have access to financial consulting services for the next year to ensure her financial stability.
After the Urbans were ambushed at a carnival by Ty Pennington on July 29, the 3,000 volunteers it took to build their house got to work. Kissell and her team left State College early on Aug. 4 to begin the day-and-a-half they had to work before the big reveal at 2 p.m. Aug. 5. By the time they arrived, another local volunteer, Scott Burk of Scott’s Landscaping in Centre Hall, had finished grading the site and building a patio and the walkways around the home with his own team. Kissell’s group passed the hours on the drive to the site by putting the finishing touches by hand to the bedcovers they began just a few days before in her studio above her husband’s motorcycle business.
First-string on Kissell’s volunteer team was her sister Amy McNamara, owner of Logue McNamara Interiors in Montoursville. As two of 10 children raised in rural Montoursville, they grew up amusing themselves. “With a mother who is an artist and a dad who is an engineer, we kids were always making stuff. We could have been either fighting with each other or doing something constructive,” Kissell says. On the site, the sisters had a finely tuned choreography from years of working together that helped solve the problems they encountered.
And although the Urban home was the second fastest build throughout the eight seasons since “Extreme Makeover” began, there were problems; anyone who has built or participated in the construction of a house can relate. Building and decorating a house in one week with all volunteers is a challenge. Having the design process orchestrated primarily by young, junior designers made the job more difficult for Kissell’s team.
Although Pennington, Hutson and DiMeo, along with guest designer Leigh Anne Tuohy (made famous when Sandra Bullock played her in “The Blind Side”) dropped by the site, the primary work and direction to the volunteers is handled by the junior teams.
Kissell’s team made window panels, shades, pillows, quilts, throws, cushions and chairs. As the build progressed, measurements changed or were unavailable, and exact information was rare, making clever adjustments and improvisations necessary. Kissell was a natural in the chaos of “Extreme Makeover”; she is a woman who has spent most of her adult life developing flexibility by raising five children. She makes mental math and abstract spatial concepts seem like child’s play. “For us, it’s like a pregnancy with lots of unknowns,” Kissell says of her calm, go-with-the-flow attitude once she got to the house site. “But the designers have been doing this, and they know it’s all going to come together.”
You might have challenged her on that point, had you seen the build site. Anyone who’s ever seen an ant farm can appreciate what the scene looked like. Blue-shirted volunteers moved in and out of the house with vigor while the show’s security team guarded the perimeter in a manner that even the White House party-crashers would have had a hard time breaching. The show’s producers make sure no one but those working on the project sees the interior of the house before the nation does when the show airs, which, at press time, was set for either Sept. 26 or sometime in October. The members of Kissell’s team are some of the privileged few. “I brought my whole team into the house because they had worked so hard. I owed it to them,” she says.
On the day of the reveal, Kissell returned to the site to complete the finishing touches. Although it was only several hours before the Urbans were scheduled to return from their Disney World vacation, the activity level was still frantic. Three times calls went out for “quiet,” as film crews taped artificially arranged conversations between celebrity designers Tuohy and Hutson. Outside, Pennington waved to an empty limo as the film crew captured the footage, and onlookers, bused in for the duration of the build, cheered wildly, even if it was at nothing. In the yard, DiMeo placed–and replaced, several times over–a pair of decorative, flower-filled rain boots next to the new gazebo until the camera crew had it just right. The show’s signature line, “move that bus,” took on new meaning as the producers directed it back and forth at least five times to get it timed and located exactly right. In truth, the only footage that isn’t at least in part contrived is the actual arrival and reaction of the family.
But the fascination with “reality” TV is part of our culture. Most of us realize our emotions are being manipulated, and we are aware that what we see isn’t entirely real, but maybe that doesn’t matter in the end. “I got the most pleasure from watching such a deserving family get this,” Kissell says. “They had such dignity. It’s the heart and soul of ‘Extreme Makeover,’ and it is a good thing. It’s like the period at the end of a sentence.” • SCM
A Centre Region Affair
Scott Burk likes to say it was a “former” friend who got him involved with the “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” house in Berks County.
He’s joking of course. The old college buddy who called and asked for his help is still a buddy. But it was a huge request: come, bring five of your employees from Scott’s Landscaping in Centre Hall, and in 24 hours grade the home site and install all the hardscapes–a patio and front and back walkways. “The landscape project would have easily been a three- to four-week project, depending on how many people you had on the job,” Burk says. “He knew he needed someone who could come in, get it done and get out.” The Centre Hall team fit the bill, and Burk jumped into action.
Little did he know that 24-hour time frame would be cut down to 12 hours by the time the team arrived Aug. 2–and that his 12 hours would be in the dark. After spending the day at a nursery workshop in Philadelphia, Burk arrived at the Hamburg site at 8 p.m. By that time, the landscape plans had already been reconfigured from what Burk was expecting, but they got to work–aided by giant floodlights that illuminated the site overnight–and cleared out by 8 a.m. the next day.
Burk’s group is one of three local businesses called into service on the “Extreme Makeover” home. In addition to a team headed by Kate Kissell of State College, which created the soft coverings for the interior, the folks at Lezzer Lumber in Curwensville supplied the trusses for the home’s whimsical roofline.
Since he returned to the Centre region, Burk says folks have been asking if his crew will end up on TV. “Yeah, you’ll probably be on for a couple of seconds, and it’ll be the back of our heads,” he tells them. “But that’s not what it’s about. It’s about helping somebody. It was a great experience.”