Home improvement shows can offer a lot of practical wisdom for its viewers, like how to knock down a wall, flip a house on a budget, or pick the perfect backsplash.
However, you will find nothing of the sort in Decorating Cents—an HGTV show from the late ’90s—whose advice, if you so choose to follow, has the very real possibility of ruining your home forever.
Picture this: rugs painted directly onto hardwood floors. Shower curtains with sewn-in beanie baby displays.
The show is basically like if Pinterest had a nervous breakdown in 1997 and then proceeded to go through 31 seasons of unmedicated manic episodes.
And naturally, the internet has become obsessed with it.
Why, you ask? Well, allow me to explain.
An HGTV Relic
Decorating Cents first began airing on the HGTV network in Oct. 1997. It focused on helping families redecorate their homes on a budget and was entirely produced and filmed in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota.
In every episode, Joan Steffend, the host, heads to a new home and collaborates with guest designers to provide room makeovers that cost $500 or less.
The show ran for more than a decade before finally ending in 2008, fading from collective memory forever. Or, at least, it would have if it wasn’t for Rob Anderson, a popular comedian and internet personality who began posting videos on his social media platforms, reacting to Decorating Cents' *unique* decor makeovers.
In one video, Anderson describes Decorating Cents style as something “only Beetlejuice could love.”
His posts quickly went viral, inspiring thousands to seek out the HGTV program (you can stream it on Amazon Prime and Discovery+) and see the chaos for themselves.
Their List of Crimes
With a budget of $500, no one expected Steffend and her team to perform miracles. With that said, they probably also didn’t expect their homes to look like a Michael’s craft store vomited all over it either.
Here are just a few examples of their crimes:
It may seem like an obvious choice to decorate the walls of a living room with some paintings or pictures, perhaps...too obvious?
At least, this seems to be the case for Decorating Cents, who chose to go with something far more avant-garde: dirty t-shirts from a camping trip.
In another clip, Steffen and a guest designer remodel a bedroom, painting the wall with a “tan cream” color, before using a rag roller to create a “leather buckskin effect.” Whatever that means.
Then, in what can only be described as an insane move, the pair use a tree branch as a curtain holder, placing it above the window. To add some pizazz, Steffend and her team tie together eight multicolored bandanas, draping the “colorful swag” over the branch for a pop of color.
“The bandanas. My god 😭," one TikToker commented.
Another person couldn’t get over the fact that the team used a tree branch for a curtain holder, writing: “A BRANCH found OUTDOORS!???? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣"
In what might be the show’s pièce de résistance, Steffend and her co-designer remodel a TV console, by painting it snot green. Then, they decoupage “sacred Indian prayers” onto the unit to give it a “trendy new” look (???).
Realizing the Sacred Indian prayer decoupage was, in fact, atrocious, the team tries to peel and scrape it off, only to come to the conclusion that the left over bits stuck to the furniture give it a nice “distressed aged look.”
Needless to say, the comments were floored over this decision.
“‘We loved this aged look’= we got tired and didn’t feel like working on this anymore,” one person joked.
Decorating Cents’ antics are so insane that some viewers started to wonder if they were trying to ruin the homes on purpose.
“I feel like they had hatred in their hearts and expressed it through this show lmao,” a viewer theorized.
All in all, this show has left people (including myself) with a lot of questions: Why did they decorate like this? How did it run for so long? And most importantly, what did those poor, poor homeowners think of the results?
The people need to know.
