Let me introduce you to Frank, Doug, Vern, Carter, Amy, Laurie, Tia, Edward, Hilda, and Paige. These folks are part of my Saturday night hang-out crew.

No, we don’t partake of adult beverages, play cards, bowl, or cook-out. At our house, we watch them paint and sew.

Stephanie, my wife, has transformed me from watching Cops and ESPN on Saturday nights to The Learning Channel and Trading Spaces. Ya’ll know what I am talking about. Fess up.

That’s right, I admit, I have fallen into the Trading Spaces trap. Trading Spaces is the show on cable where two sets of neighbors agree to let the other redecorate a room in each other’s houses. The above mentioned people are the so-called designers that decide what is to be done. The neighbors just bite their lips and mumble about how awful the finished room is going to look.

Most of the time, the neighbors are right. I never thought that I would see hay glued to a kitchen wall, a room made to look like the inside of a train car, or a circus tent in the middle of a den. But these are just examples of some of the re-designs that have been done.

The Trading Places curse went a little too far at our house in Alabama (the one I am trying to sell) a few weekends before I moved here. I arrived home that Friday from a long week at work to find two gallons of paint, which were different colors, along with brushes, rollers, and paint trays waiting. I walked in the door and was informed that &uot;we&uot; were going to paint our dining room and foyer over the weekend. Well, the &uot;we&uot; lasted about 5 minutes and I was finished painting at about 8:00

Sunday evening.

Since we will have a new home here-hopefully soon-I am sure that the Trading Spaces curse will continue. Only this time, the curse will be turbo-driven. Paint, drapes, fabrics, pillows, the whole nine yards will all be driven by a Trading Spaces nut and her accomplice, my four-year old daughter, McKenzie.

Stephanie is definitely hooked on this show. It’s so bad that now she even watches the British version of the show, Changing Rooms. This show airs on BBC and seems to be on 24 hours a day. I have put my foot down about watching this version of the show, mainly because I can’t understand what the people are saying.

One of the good things about Stephanie’s obsession with Trading Spaces is her understanding with my obsession with the cool motorcycle building shows. To me, American Choppers and the Great Biker Build-Off are two of the best shows on television these days. Maybe our new house will have a big garage or shop and maybe I can convince her to let me imitate those shows. For some reason, I don’t think that will happen.