I’m Ty Pennington. You might have seen my face on shows like Trading Spaces and of course also on Extreme Makeover—Home Edition. And I’m here to talk about my new book, Life to the Extreme. I wrote it in seven days, which is a challenge. Why not write a book in seven days, the same way you build a house in seven days? Because both are theoretically impossible, yet sometimes miracles do happen.
With the book, actually, we’re doing a $25,000 kitchen makeover giveaway. All you have to do is go to TyPennington.com/25k and register to become part of the contest. The great news is, is not only will you get that money toward your kitchen, but I’ll come out and actually consult you, and tell you what I think you should do for that kitchen.
It was pretty obvious, I guess, from a young age, that I had—I was different. I think, back then, behavioral-wise. Nobody really knew what to call what I had. And not only that, those generations of people that sort of raised my generation were a little bit more like, children should be seen and not heard. And so I was the opposite of that. All you could do is hear me.
And I think that’s basically kind of what happens with ADHD: You get so frustrated that nothing’s soaking in. Another analogy of, like, what it’s like to have ADHD, I say in the book, is it’s like trying to play ping pong against somebody while reciting the alphabet backwards. Because that’s really what it is, is you’re trying to study, or you’re trying to absorb the words that are coming from a paragraph, but at the same time, you’re thinking about this, you’re listening to a conversation over there, you’ve seen something shiny in the object to the left.
And so you’re just—you’re soaking in everything, and not focusing on one. And that’s the challenge. But you’re also impulsive. That’s probably one of the reasons why I had so much fun on Extreme [Makeover]. Like, literally, we were tearing down houses, and the house was falling six inches from my body, but I was excited that I was doing a Buster Keaton and coming that close. You don’t grow out of it. I think that’s also part of the book.
It’s awesome that I’ve lived an incredible life where I could be part of shows that really not only sort of changed the face of DIY television, but also have sort of changed the way people treat each other and look at each other. Because Extreme had a bigger impact, not just on the viewer, but literally on the communities that we built houses in.
So after I left Trading Spaces, I couldn’t sleep. I was staring at the ceiling, going, “How could you leave the best show that you’ve ever been, you know, given?” But luckily, these people did want to do a TV show with me. A month later, they called me back, and they’re, like, “Ty, I think we’ve got the show. So you, six designers, build a house in seven days. What do you think?” I’m, like, “I think it’s impossible but—I mean, I know it’s impossible, but it does seem like it might be a good TV show.”
The idea was basically to build a house in seven days. And the stress and sort of nuts that you go through—you know, we find a house that’s the ugliest house in the neighborhood. Once we started doing the build, we realized that, you know, the reason the house looks so bad is because the family has got a daughter struggling with cancer, and that’s why all the money they have is going to her treatments. As we’re shooting this thing, we’re finally at the end, the two builders have done an amazing job. I can’t believe we actually built a house in seven days.
And when we brought that family home, we walked them around the bus. And for the first moment, like, these guys saw their house, and I remember them just like going, “Oh my God!” And at that moment, like, you just saw and felt this emotion. And you looked over, and the two twin builders were crying, and all the guys in blue T-shirts were crying. And I looked at my producer, and I was like, “Man, I don’t know what you guys think you have here, but this is our show.”
And that was just the beginning. After a couple more seasons, you know, communities were sending in letters about families who were giving and deserving, and saying, “Please come help these families, they do so much in our community.”
You got to remember, when we move the bus, which is probably the most amazing moment in the show, people would do somersaults, people would, like, get on the ground, they’d pound, and they’d scream up at the sky. People would run up and down the street, high-fiving all these people that are lined up, just with joy and elation on their faces. To witness that, it changes you as a human being, because you see what change looks like in somebody’s face. To be part of that is unbelievable. And something about the power of all this goodness, of wanting to make someone’s life better, that really changed everyone being a part of it. And on television, you rarely have an experience like that.
