Oakland: Webster Street

Props to starcrossedkat.

Okay. I'm going to try to remain calm, even though this episode sends my blood pressure through the roof and makes the veins in my head throb all cartoon-like.

We begin with MPDP informing us that we're in Oakland, California, and throwing in some sports-related yatter about the homeowners tackling each other's houses. Let me tell you right now, the only sports metaphor that could come close to doing justice to this episode is that of bullfighting. I'll leave it to you to figure out which party is the bull and which is the gored, bloody matador.

We see Mike and Rhea (one of only three interracial couples I can remember ever seeing on this show) coming down their stairs with their adorable young son, Thane. They want their kitchen done; we see a shot of a kitchen with white counters, a large window above the sink, and lots and lots of orangey-stained, knotty pine cabinetry. It's an okay kitchen. Not exactly hellish. Then we are introduced to April and Leslie (and I'm guessing they're a couple, though it's never made explicit) and their two kids. They want their living room done. They've got what appears to be a very nice Craftsman bungalow with a living room typical of the style: simple but substantial woodwork, coffered ceiling detail, a simple brick fireplace, hardwood floors, etc. The room is a bit overrun with toys, and the mantel is overrun with framed pictures, but there's nothing wrong with the room that a little judicious furniture and accessory shopping and some well-chosen paint for the walls wouldn't fix.

MPDP tells us that Genevieve "Bj�rk" Gorder and Hildi "Princess of Darkness" Santo-Tomas will be designing the rooms with the help of Amy "No, It's Not My Last Name" Wynn Pastor. They each grab a power tool and feign a Charlie's Angels pose. MPDP informs us that Mike and Rhea want to make their kitchen "more inviting and colourful" for their son Thane, as well as incorporate Rhea's collection of cobalt blue glass. We see a big line of cobalt blue bottles and containers along her windowsill. She'll be happy as long as her glass is still around somewhere. Mike says they have lots of space in their kitchen, but that they'd like to do something with the cabinets, since they're nothing special. Mike says the kitchen's a little boring; Rhea laughs, semi-insulted, since she decorated it. They seem like a good-natured couple. He points out that all she's done in there is paint one wall a sort of soft green. Mike says it would be bad if the floor (which is vinyl) were painted. Ah, so you've seen this show before. He also would not like to see the cabinet space diminished at all, since they have a lot of stuff and they use all the cabinet space they have. Rhea says she doesn't think there's too much that would upset them, since they are "ready to go and ready to have some fun with this."

We see April and Leslie's living room floor, upon which there's a beige area rug. April and Leslie are picking up lots of toys as MPDP tells us they just want to have one "adult-friendly" space in their home. Hear that? "Adult-friendly," not "livestock-friendly." Also, "adult-friendly" doesn't have to mean "hazardous to children." I'm just saying. The living room has white walls; dark woodwork; lots of shelves filled with books (which biases me toward these homeowners immediately); a smallish burgundy couch with a dark gold botanical pattern on it (looks like acanthus leaves); a small wooden coffee table; and a TV on a small wooden stand. The rest is mostly boxes and baskets of toys. They want to have some place to entertain. April says she thinks the room would look great in earth tones, and that perhaps the fireplace could be highlighted with colour. The brick of the fireplace is painted white, and there are built-in bookshelves on each side, with a nice-looking wood mantel running along the top of it all. Above each bookcase is a small window, the style of which is consistent with the era of the house. She also thinks the books could be featured more prominently, although they're already one of the most noticeable elements in the room, so I'm not sure what she's visualizing here. April says she would not like it if the room was painted lemon yellow. Leslie concurs. They are not big on the Southwest thing, and turquoise is not their colour. The main thing is that they want the toys gone; they're sick of them. This may be due to the fact that I don't have kids, but it seems to me that you either devote your life to constantly removing toys from the room and trying to keep the kids out of there, or you resign yourself to having toys wherever your kids go. It doesn't seem like something that can be solved with design, other than to create storage in the room for toys, which isn't what they're asking.

Key swap. April and Leslie are Team Red; Mike and Rhea are Team Blue. MPDP tells Mike he's going to have to hold his own as the only man on the whole show for two days. Don't you worry, Missy: if he can't hold his own, maybe he'll ask you to do it. Mike assures her he can do it for two days. Mike reminds me slightly of Jerry from ER, but not because of Jerry's annoyingness. It's partly his voice and partly his appearance. MPDP rattles off the rules, emphasizing that there are two female designers, for reasons I can't fathom -- are the lesbians throwing her, or what? She winds up with some "Are you manly enough to follow the rules?" nonsense directed at Mike, and I think, good gravy, are we going to have two days of her flirting with and sucking up to the only man around? I mean, she generally seems very comfortable with women, and not like one of those tiresome women who has to be the centre of all male attention at all times, so I don't know what the hell this is all about. Anyway, Mike replies, "Maybe," which I like. She swaps the keys and they run off.

MPDP voice-overs that Genevieve plans to turn Mike's and Rhea's kitchen into a "Creole dream," using bright colours and kid-friendly art. Gen -- for reasons best known to herself and God -- has seen fit to put her long hair up into several little twisty, Bjrkian topknots all over her head. It's cute, I guess, but it's kind of distracting. As April and Leslie enter, Gen's gathering up all the blue glass, and announces that the bottle collection is the inspiration for the room. She mentions that they'll be using blue and yellow, and also suggests that there'll be some kind of Creole-Southern-French thing going on. They'll be decluttering the kitchen as well; they all agree that there's too much going on in the kitchen. It doesn't seem especially cluttered to me, other than the windowsill, but whatever. Leslie asks Gen, "Speaking of too much, what's up with that hair today?" Hee! Gen giggles, "You don't like my hair?" April describes it as a little alien-ish. Gen giggles some more and says she has to "change it up" to keep it interesting, and that this is the "before" and after two days they'll see the "after." They get on with unloading the room.

Rhea and Mike run up April and Leslie's porch, which I love, with its big chunky columns. Inside, Hildi is stomping her Prada-covered cloven hooves into a big bale of hay. (Before we go any further: folks have pointed out on the forums that while everyone refers to this as the "hay" episode, that the material is actually straw. Given what Hildi does with it, it makes absolutely no difference, and somehow the word "hay" is funnier than the word "straw" so we're going with "hay." Deal.) Rhea and Mike are understandably surprised. Hildi says it's straw (yes, whatever, Psycholady) and that she really wanted to bring out the straw colour in the sofa fabric. Well, you wouldn't want to do anything crazy involving paint, or fabric, now, would you? Rhea can't close her mouth, she's so taken aback. Hildi says that the whole room's been designed around the sofa. Hildi: "What better than straw and...straw?" I'll tell you, with a thought process like that, she's not coming anywhere near my living room, which is painted a colour called Beeswax. Not like she wouldn't be run out of the quaint Victorian village I live in by angry townsfolk with antique pitchforks, anyway.

Hildi asks, rhetorically, "Do we have any boundaries in this room?" Mike and Rhea can't think of any. Hildi says that they're going to reposition the sofa; they'll also tear out the bookcases and build them new ones, so that the books can all be in one place instead of "scattered" about the room (I'm hating the sound of that). She states that they're going to make "something" for the fireplace, and I guess expects Mike and Rhea to intuit what that might be; when they seem strangely unable to read her mind, she adds, with a wiggle of her hips, that it will give it "kind of a little" decorative look. Actually, it already has a decorative look. And they're going to build louvers for the window, which is currently covered by plain white pleated drapes on a thick wooden rod. Hildi announces that there's no painting and no sewing for this room (too bad, 'cause that's about 75% of what it needs, along with maybe a couple of well-chosen pieces of new furniture) -- just building and "gluing," at which point she picks up a wad of hay and gestures toward the walls with it. Rhea gasps. Hildi adds that they're going to do a treatment on the ceiling to give it some "texture." I'm guessing this will involve hurling cooked pasta at the ceiling and seeing what sticks. And then covering it with gold spray paint. And now that I've seen a better shot of the ceiling, it's not actually coffered, but has a recessed area maybe three inches deep, surrounded by a very simple border. They unload the room, over and around the hay bale.

Gen's team is taking all the cupboard doors off their hinges. They ask her exactly what they're going to be doing. She indicates that while she loves wood, there's an awful lot of it in this kitchen, and it's pine, so "it's not sacrilegious to paint it," and that they're going to make the small uppermost cabinets into backlit display units. Team Red seems excited about that.

Hildi's got several buckets of joint compound mixed up for the "ceiling texture." Then she pops open a can of very pinkish raspberry paint. Mike and Rhea are audibly horrified. Hildi pours the paint into the joint compound, assuring them that it won't be that "hot pink." Right. April and Leslie's kids throw toys all over as we go to commercial.

Gen brings up the issue of the appliance colour. April eagerly says that she wants to paint them, and Gen announces that they're painting them all black. This is a pretty ambitious project: painting cupboards and appliances as part of a thirty-six-hour kitchen redo...that's Vern country, man. Team Red's pretty jazzed about that. In a scary little bit of foreshadowing, April jokes, "We're going to still have friends at the end of this show?"

Back at Casa Nutbar, the women are in hardhats (to mix joint compound? Wuh?); they've got two buckets of dark pink goo and two buckets of dark brown goo. Rhea comments on its pinkness. Hildi asks, "Do you want me to add more...pink?" She laughs devilishly toward the camera, and I honestly can't tell if she's evil, insane, or both. I know this: she's not in close personal contact with what we commonly call "reality." Rhea thinks the colour should be more terracotta. Hildi agrees to add more brown, which they seem to be doing with spray paint. What the Frank? Honest to God, this is one of the most idiotic procedures I've seen on this show yet.

April is announcing that she's "very, very, very open," and that "they couldn't do anything wrong to that room, basically." Leslie says it needs some work. File that under "Didn't Know When They Had It Good."

Mike and Rhea are alone, and he asks her what she thinks, as they stare at the four buckets of pink and brown goo. She says it looks like they should be icing a cake, and that it doesn't look like terracotta to her. It doesn't indeed. Nor is the sofa terracotta, I might add.

Gen's eliciting aesthetic preferences from her team; April reiterates that she doesn't like yellow. She doesn't mind pale sunshine-y yellows, but really doesn't like bright or lemony yellows. She also hates fluorescent and Crayola colours.

Hildi's up on a ladder, smearing brownish-pink goo onto the ceiling. She pronounces it "perfection." Her narcissism is astounding. She seems truly unable to conceive of the idea that anything she thought of might be misguided, half-baked, or completely idiotic. Rhea claims it's not half-bad, as some goo loses the fight with gravity and falls down. Hildi says that's what the hats are for. Still: hardhats? How about painter's caps, or the Axl Rose do-rag I favour for such work? Rhea incomprehensibly encourages her, saying it will work. Not that it would make any difference to Hildi what Rhea thought.

Gen comes out to see Amy Wynn, who's messing around with some small blocks of wood, announcing that she has three projects for her to do. Gen tries to stick a little white flower behind Amy Wynn's ear, saying, "I brought you this, because you're my girl." Cute. She can't quite get it in there between all of Amy's hair and the sunglasses perched on her head, so Amy takes it and sticks it in there herself. I wonder in passing what Amy Wynn would look like with Gen's twisty topknot 'do. Gen shows Amy Wynn an area on a cupboard door where she's drawn lines indicating the space to be cut out and replaced with screening. Amy Wynn loves it. Gen's also designed an island with two levels, so that there's a lower surface for Thane to sit at and use. Amy Wynn loves it. And then there are two little toy-storage benches.

Team Blue has most of the ceiling smeared with the goo now. It's sort of a dirty rose. Actually, the colour is verygenitalia. I'm just saying. MPDP zooms in and announces that she can always count on Hildi to do something insane. Actually, she just says "something different." But she means "insane." MPDP asks if the hay's going on the ceiling too. Hildi answers in a confused way.

April's painting the cupboard frames. Gen's begun spray painting the fridge black. In the kitchen. Apart from the overspray issue (nothing around it is protected), spray painting in an enclosed area is not the greatest idea in the world. Even a small thing (like, say, a lamp base) can take enough spraying to really overwhelm a room with fumes, never mind the amount of spraying you'd need to do to cover the fridge, dishwasher, and stove, which all have to be done to match the black oven. I also hope she's using the right kind of paint for the stove, because it has to be something that can withstand high temperatures, not just regular spray paint. Gen's thinking they should just all be black. Great, but look into an oxygen tank.

Amy Wynn is attempting to find out from Hildi what she wants in the way of carpentry. Hildi says they're going to knock out "these shelves." Now, it looks to me like the wood on the mantel and the wooden window casings are the same wood, of the same vintage, certainly original to the house, and they have a reddish wood stain. I can't say for sure what type of wood it is, but it does look like pretty nice stuff. I've read that it was Douglas fir. The shelves built in underneath the mantel on either side of the fireplace look like a much later addition, of lesser quality wood, in a more yellowy brownish stain that doesn't match the mantel. (This is one of my hangups -- clashing and mismatched wood stains.) I just want to set the scene for those of you who haven't seen the episode for yourselves. Hildi says they're going to build a whole wall of shelves, and shows Amy Wynn a diagram. She wants to concentrate all the books in one area. I'm having trouble picturing this looking good: It might work if every inch of the wall surrounding the fireplace were filled with nicely designed shelves, but because of the windows on either side of the chimney breast, it will be weird to have bookshelves above a fireplace, and then on either side of it. It would be too busy, and also? Weird. Oh, I said that, didn't I? Then she also says she's going to hang curtains behind the shelving unit (huh?) because she wants to "get rid of these two windows." Holy crow. I don't know what it is with this woman and her hatred of windows and light, but she really does go out of her way to make windows inaccessible and to make rooms unnecessarily gloomy. (And my favourite colour is black, people, so it's not like I don't know from gloom.) She must really and truly be a vampire. And she's proposing to hide one of the nicest architectural features in the room. Also, they're going to be hanging some lights down in front of where the windows were. Because it's a wise expenditure of money to cut off any natural light, and then pay for artificial light.

April and Leslie are painting the lower cupboards a pale yellow. They say they really like it. April whispers something that I can't quite make out; I think she says it's really yellow. Gen comes in and wonders if they're telling secrets. April says it's "really yellow now." Gen sneers, "You think that's 'really yellow'? This is yellow!" She produces an egg yolk-coloured tile. April thinks it's practically orange. Gen holds it up to her red shirt to show its yellowness, saying that "between you and this is orange." I don't think the tile works with the paint colour: the paint is a very cool yellow and the tile is an extremely warm tone. Gen opens a can of paint which she calls indigo; I don't think it's that dark, it's more of a light cobalt colour. It's nice. April gasps. Gen slaps some up over the green wall.

thing you know, Hildi's whacking the crap out of the mantel; someone offscreen -- I think it's Rhea -- says, "Oh, my God!" as Amy Wynn and Hildi destroy the mantel and bookshelves. I'd like to make it utterly clear that Hildi does not just carefully remove the mantel in such a way so that it could possibly be restored, even though I think removing it would be a stupid enough move. No: her first move is actually to take a gratuitous whack at the top of mantel, to destroy the surface. I don't see what other reason there could be for doing that: if you want to pry something up, usually you don't first bang it further down onto whatever it's attached to. It was just an ignorant, wanton, destructive impulse. I'm just utterly appalled. (With two Ps.) Amy Wynn asks, "So they weren't, uh, big fans of this mantel, were they?" Hildi, in her most breezily dismissive tone: "I didn't ask them."

MPDP is excited to see the blue that Gen is painting on the kitchen walls. It's a very nice, strong blue. It should set off the glass nicely. MPDP says she likes it, but wonders how, if the walls are blue, they'll be able to see the blue glass. Gen explains that the glass will be backlit in the uppermost cupboards. MPDP opines that that's "so fancy."

Let's see what Lucifer's handmaiden is up to now: she's explaining to Mike and Rhea the "procedure" for ruining the living room walls: Mike will roll on the glue just like paint, and Hildi and Rhea will stick the hay to walls. Hildi hands Rhea some hay, suggesting that she pick out the "yucky" pieces. Yeah, make sure you only get the nicest, sleekest pieces. Hildi says they'll try to put it on in a "little bit of an organized fashion." I can't wait to see this. Mike starts rolling on the glue.

Amy Wynn and Leslie work on the base for the kitchen island.

Mike's rolling glue and Hildi and Rhea are sticking the hay on. It looks exactly as bad as you would think, and if you don't think this would look bad, well, then...I can't help you. Rhea mentions, "I'm kinda concerned about it...." Hildi: "Pretend it's stucco!" What kind of insane remark is that? Rhea explains that she's concerned about the baby and the toddler. Hildi has no clue whatsoever what Rhea's driving at. Seriously, she doesn't. Rhea, patiently: "They might pick it off." Hildi: "Well, they need to be told not to." Parents everywhere, and sane non-parents, snort loudly. Many of them double over with laughter, wiping tears from their weary eyes. Mike laughs and states that Hildi doesn't have kids. Rhea agrees. Hildi asks: "Do they clean house? Do they pick lint off the sofa?" Oy. Newsflash: children will eat dog poo if it strikes their fancy. They will shove Flintstones vitamins up their noses. (This is one of my brother's childhood classics.) They will try to flush their siblings down the toilet (happened to a high-school boyfriend of mine). I knew a four-year-old who managed to back the family car out of the driveway before his mother caught him. ["I did that in a bank parking lot while my mom was inside, when I was about four." -- Wing Chun] Kids can and will do almost anything, and they're not particularly responsive, especially at young ages, to stern admonitions. Get. A. Clue. Rhea assures Hildi that kids will, for instance, pick lint off the sofa. Hildi seems unconvinced. Need I even bring up the likely allergenicity of this substance?

Amy Wynn asks Leslie if she's ever used pneumatic power tools; Leslie has and is totally casual about it. Leslie shoots a couple of nails into the island.

Team Blue has a fair bit of wall covered; Hildi's still pressing the child safety issue, saying the first bite of hay the kid takes, she's not going to like. Hildi shoots one of her "Are they buying this?" looks at the camera. The walls look ridiculous and dreadful. Rhea's still doubtful. Mike says, "Horses eat it." Hildi: "Are you implying this child's a horse?" Actually, he's implying that some living creatures find it edible, so perhaps a child might. In case that wasn't perfectly obvious. Hildi: "I mean, do they walk around outside and eat grass?" Were you born forty-two years old, lady? Rhea, getting exasperated: "Yes, Hildi! You don't have a baby, right? You wouldn't know. I guess you wouldn't know." Well, I don't have a baby either, but somehow in close to four decades of ambulating around Planet Earth I've managed to apprehend one or two things about the world, including the inquisitive, impulsive, and inexperienced nature of children. I'm just saying.

Amy Wynn and Leslie continue carpentering.

Mike, casually: "Hey, if they didn't like this, how would they get it off?" With great difficulty? Just a guess. Hildi: "Same way you get off wallpaper." Hmm. Like I said. She adds, "It just won't come off in big pieces." No kidding. Rhea: "You know how they're going to get it off? They're going to call their friendly neighbours and put us to work." I'd count on it.

The bumper back into the show is Hildi sitting in a huge pile of hay, gleefully throwing it around and frolicking in it. Yeah. Gen takes April and Leslie into their neighbours' dining room, which is a lovely room with nice woodwork and a gorgeous cabinet in it. Gen's discovered that they have lots of family photos in there, and reminds us all what a huge photography buff she is. She asks them to find five images anywhere in the house that they think are the most prized images (photos, Thane's drawings, whatever).

April and Leslie's living room is mostly covered with hay now, as is the border area of the ceiling. It looks just damn awful. Of course, the walls are actually only sparsely covered with hay, since it's a lot of work to stick thousands of individual bits of hay onto walls in any fashion, never mind densely. Rhea wonders what Mike thinks the kids will do about the hay. He thinks they'll mess with it at first but then it will just be part of the house and they'll ignore it. This seems to indicate that he thinks his neighbours will actually accept this "design." The glue fumes must be getting to him. Rhea thinks that as long as it's not too loose, it might be okay, and suggests trimming the loose pieces. Mike says they might be trimming the whole wall week. Okay, so he's still in touch with reality. Rhea hopes they won't be doing that. Think again.

Paige Cam. She's found Team Red in what I guess is a bedroom, looking at pictures tacked up on the wall around a huge image of baby Thane, who is, as I said, adorable. She badgers them about not being in the kitchen working. They insist that they are working. MPDP is skeptical. April explains their task.

Rhea's experiencing some remorse already, saying she promised her friends she wouldn't allow anything too crazy to happen, and now it has. Mike says that the only restriction he heard April mention was about yellow paint. He's trusting that this is going to turn out okay.

Gen and Leslie are sewing some egg yolk-coloured curtains. Gen found one $9.95 bedspread that's covering all their fabric needs, for the curtains and two cushions. Gen asks if Leslie's okay with the sewing, and refers to the fact that Leslie works as a 911 dispatch operator. That has to be a hellishly stressful job. Worse than moderating The Osbournesboards. My hat's off to her. Gen jokes, "Do you feel like calling [911] right now?" Leslie laughs, and kids that between calls, she sews. Gen giggles and calls her a "big liar."

MPDP and Rhea have some dark gold paper spread out in front of them, and MPDP says they actually get to use wallpaper glue for paper this time. I suppose they'll be gluing this to the window glass. I mean, it only makes sense. Actually, it appears that they'll be gluing it to the table. MPDP blathers about this a bit and Rhea humours her. They begin taking the legs off the table.

Leslie says, "I figured out why your hair's like that." She sticks a couple of pins in the topknots on Gen's head. Gen giggles, "I'm a pincushion!" Leslie sticks more pins in, as Gen says, "Why not? There's a reason for everything, and there's logic behind everything I do." I can't decide whether I find this reassuring.

MPDP and Rhea glue and smooth paper onto the table top. They both agree that the paper is pretty. Rhea jokes that she might steal this table. MPDP: "You're going to steal the only thing that's good in this room?" Oh no you di-in't! Rhea seems surprised at MPDP, and says, "Shh, don't say that, I think Hildi's coming."

There's a knock at the door and Leslie jumps up to answer it. It's so obviously staged that she doesn't even bother to try to hide it. Amy Wynn comes in with some big framed thing. It's the top for the island. Gen asks Leslie how she feels about tiling. Leslie's ready.

Hildi and Mike are outside staining slats of wood. She's making eight-foot vertical wooden louvers to put in front of the windows. That way the view and the light can never be completely unblocked. There'll always be some obstruction. Huzzah!

Gen is showing her team the tiles for the island: there are white and cobalt ones in addition to the egg yolk yellow ones they've already seen. She says they need to decide on a pattern. April wonders if she wants something symmetrical or not; Gen replies, "Whatever looks beautiful." Basically, she just hopes they don't have to cut a lot of tiles. Good plan.

Mike ventures, "That straw idea..." Hildi: "Is this, like, the moment of truth?" I pray that he will tell Her Satanic Majesty it's the worst idea since lead plumbing, but he just asks her how she came up with it. "And what makes you think it's going to work?" Hildi, as unconcerned as ever: "I know it's going to work." She insists that it's like wallpaper. No, no, it's really not. She asserts that it's like "straw wallpaper" -- perhaps she's driving at grasscloth? -- and wonders why anyone should use that when you can just put straw right on the wall. Why, indeed?

Gen is laying out tiles and wonders if Mike and Rhea will like it. April thinks they will.

Hildi has yet another project: they're going to create a screen for the front of the "marble" fireplace. Marble? That's marble? Okay. It sure looked like brick to me. I haven't seen much marble in Craftsman houses. She says they don't want to paint it. I can't imagine why. Wouldn't paint ruin marble? Isn't that the whole idea behind this Abaddonian scheme? She claims she wants the white of the fireplace to show through, just like the white of the walls shows through behind the straw. What. Ever. Hildi's got a roll of brass mesh (ew) and coloured glass rods and some brass wire. I can't even picture how godawful this screen is going to look. Rhea says she can make the screen. Hildi shows us the glass rods, which are nice enough colours of green, gold, and red, I guess.

Gen comes in to give her team its homework. She acknowledges that they've been painting for "seventy hours," but that there's a bit more work to do. They have to sand, prime, and paint the cupboard doors that will have the screens applied to the cutout areas.

Hildi's team's homework is to make the screen, finish hay-ifying the ceiling, stain two little wicker stools (for the children...aw!) the same as the trim, and finish staining any of the louver slats that still need it. And depending on what Amy Wynn gets done, they can stain that stuff, too.

Gen hugs her team, tells them they did a good job, and vamooses.

Day two. Hildi enthuses over the fireplace screen. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's hideous. There are strips of brass mesh maybe fourteen inches wide applied vertically in front of the fireplace. The glass rods are affixed somehow at random angles throughout the mesh, and there are some circular-looking things -- marbles? beads? -- that I can't figure out. Hildi says it's better than she imagined. Rhea says they were up until 3 AM working on everything. She adds that she wanted to make sure that everything's attached really well so that it wouldn't present a hazard to the children. It won't matter anyway; when their mothers see this place, they'll probably need to be hospitalized and their kids will become temporary wards of the state anyway. Rhea outlines what still needs to be done, but both Rhea and Hildi think it's beautiful. It looks just wretched in front of the Craftsman fireplace.

Gen greets her team. Leslie tells her it was nice of her to show up. Gen giggles. Leslie and April are painting; Gen says that the paint has been a big pain, because it's peeling everywhere. Hmm. I wonder why -- it looked to me like they primed the cupboards. I don't think it's especially humid. Wrong primer, maybe? Who knows. Gen outlines what still has to be done: finish painting the cupboards and appliances, install the lighting, grout the tiles on the island, and probably other stuff too. She says she's not feeling too happy because of the paint issues, but assures them that they're going to fix it. Gen: "This is the day that the magic happens." White, or black?

Hildi says that they'll staple the mesh onto the fireplace, and cut out the hole for the mouth of the fireplace. She says that Amy Wynn has to finish the bookshelves, and that she and Mike will work on the louvers. Also, the shades (I guess for those ugly Crafstman windows that are letting in some vexing light) have to be made and the lights have to installed. Then Hildi thinks they can call it a day. More like a long dark night of the soul, but whatever. Oh, one more thing about the hay: they need to don gloves and brush off the big scrappy pieces of hay and trim around the edges.

Gen is grouting the tiles for the island. MPDP shows up, looks at the top, and asks where it's going, and if it's artwork. Gen, sweetly: "Everything is artwork, Paige." MPDP smiles and touches some topknots: "Especially your hair." Gen giggles and says she'll take it out for the reveal.

Amy Wynn is nailing wood blocks into the ceiling. We see the Pepto-Dismal (tm starcrossedkat) ceiling in all its godawful glory: it's sloppy, blotchy, and ugly. It looks the way the frosting on a cake would look if executed by an uncoordinated and apathetic four-year-old. Not to mention that it's surrounded by a messy border of hay. I'm sure Hildi thinks the ceiling treatment looks like professional Venetian plaster, though. Amy Wynn ascertains that Hildi will be installing the louvers. Hildi tells Amy Wynn that they need to hustle on the shelves. Actually, she says, "Giddyup, horsie." Amy Wynn takes this in her usual good-natured way.