Very Extreme Home Makeover

One hammer and a little paint won't exactly change your life, but if 100 people pick up hammers and paintbrushes, well, that's a different story. On “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” a reality TV show that airs on ABC, up to 100 workers along with a cast of architects, contractors and designers work around the clock to renovate a home completely in just seven days.

“It's really more like five-and-a-half,” says Executive Producer Tom Forman. Before one finger is lifted, he explains, the first day-and-a-half of the schedule is spent getting to know the home's family members and their needs.

During its first season, the show took on a challenging project: to adapt an existing, three-level home in Ventura, Calif., to be entirely maneuverable and livable for 22-year-old Robert Gil, paralyzed following a car accident in 2002.

While a multitude of options are available today to retrofit residential surroundings that will support independent lifestyles for HME users, there is little consumer awareness of such products. Show producers had to become overnight experts in what it takes to live productively with a disability. Members of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association were called in to train the show's staff in everything from the kind of language to use when talking to Robert to the turning radius of a wheelchair.

The show aims to provide home makeovers to deserving families (many of the homeowners on the series have faced death and disease), but this was the first time one of its episodes had featured a person with a disability.

“We're looking for families that desperately need a home renovation,” Forman says. “Not just because [the] house is a mess, but because [they're] dealing with difficult circumstances, struggling to keep a family together and a smile on [their] face.”

The Zitek family fit the profile. When Robert's accident left him paralyzed, his mother, Pat Zitek, gave up her career in real estate to take care of him full time. Sequestered to quarters in the basement where the home's rec room had been, Robert spent all his time living one floor below the rest of the family, using a separate entrance through which he had to be lifted and using a bathroom he could only shower in with assistance. He had not seen the top two floors of his house for two years.