Saturday, October 04, 2003

By Gretchen McKay, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Phyllis Stern says there's a really easy way to tell if her neighbor Bella Gerlich is happy: She shouts "Wa-hoo!" at the top of her lungs.

	BEFORE: Stern's living room had two cherry breakfronts and a camel-back couch that was later padded and slipcovered. AFTER: Phyllis Stern points out the changes made to her living room, which took on a "spiritual Santa Fe" look that includes the bow and arrow and painting on the rear wall. (Matt Freed, Post-Gazette) Click photo for larger image.

So imagine Stern's alarm a few weeks ago, when Gerlich and her husband, Grant, were led blindly into the second-floor den of their Lawrenceville home by Paige Davis, host of The Learning Channel's "Trading Spaces." Stern and her friend Burdette Platt had spent the previous two days redecorating the room with the help of designer Christi Proctor, and the "reveal" -- for better or worse -- was about to be captured on camera.

"So I'm hiding in the bathroom and it's really hot," Stern recalls with a laugh, "and all of the sudden I hear not 'Wa-hoo!' but 'Wow, it's so b-YOOT-e-fool!' "

Knowing that home owners sometimes feign happy reactions when they really want to scream in horror, Stern shot Platt a frightened look.

"I thought, 'She's going to take a knife from the kitchen and carve her initials in my chest!' "

It was only a few moments later, after the Gerlichs had had the chance to drink in all the changes and a smiling Bella was giving Stern a big hug, that she realized that the "Trading Spaces" crew had, indeed, done good.

Waiting to see if the two sets of homeowners will squeal with delight or dissolve into unhappy tears at the end of the two-day shoot is a large part of what makes this Emmy-winning show so popular.

But it's also about home design and what you can do, with the help of a professional designer and $1,000, to transform a blah room into something incredible.

In July, designers Proctor and Frank Bielec arrived with a crew in Lawrenceville to film the first of three episodes in Pittsburgh. (The Lawrenceville makeover aired last Saturday. The other two will air tonight.)

They had their work cut out for them: Though the two row houses stand next to each another on Penn Avenue, they couldn't be more different. Built in the 1870s, the Gerlichs' Victorian home has high ceilings, original woodwork and 100-year-old wide-plank floors. Stern's much smaller 11-year-old townhouse features carpeting, tighter spaces and lots of cream-color-painted drywall.

It's not as if the designers arrived on the scene completely cold. Both had received a "scouting report" with photos of their respective rooms beforehand, had sketched out preliminary designs and had even done some shopping.

Texas-born Proctor, a relative newcomer who joined the show in May, decided to convert the Gerlichs' mishmash of a den -- furnished with an inexpensive futon, particleboard desk and framed photographs of old Lawrenceville -- into a sophisticated urban study.

Next door, the grandfatherly and bespectacled Bielec, best known for his cutesy country designs, gave Stern's pretty but plain-Jane living room a "spiritual Santa Fe" look.

To make the Gerlichs' den look as old as the rest of the house, Proctor had Stern and Platt paint the walls deep red and give them texture with a rough coat of dry wall mud. Then they "aged" them with a coat of a chocolate-colored glaze. They also slightly distressed the baseboards and window sills with an electric sander.

"You want the rooms to flow," says Proctor.

Meanwhile, carpenter Ty Pennington was busy constructing "his and her" work stations/bookcases out of oak boards and a boxful of balustrades that Proctor found at Construction Junction in Point Breeze. Two wing-backed chairs (one leather, one velvet) and a box of gray-green tiles were also part of the plan.

Stern wanted to create a comfortable seating area in the room for her friends, so Proctor had seamster Jeff Fender sew a butterscotch-colored slipcover for the velvet chair. The leather one got a new dhurrie-covered seat cushion that matches the cushion atop the Gerlichs' new coffee table, made from an old oak filing cabinet.

There wasn't time to strip the woodwork of its many coats of white paint, so Proctor settled for dressing up the base of the fireplace with the salvaged tiles. The team also mounted old tin ceiling tiles the designer brought from Texas above the fireplace and between the two shuttered windows overlooking the side yard.

To make sure everything got done in two days, everyone pitched in -- producers, production assistants, even Davis' sister Brooke, who lives in Pittsburgh.

Next door, Bielec made equally drastic changes. To give the off-white room some warmth, one wall was faux-finished with divided rollers in soft earth tones while a second accent wall got a coat of slightly darker paint. Bielec then created a "Navajo blanket" effect on the faux-painted wall with dark-brown stripes and small silver rectangles inset with glued-on glass beads.

"I'm terrified they're not going to like this room," Bielec moaned as he climbed the ladder. "I hope we're not going in the wrong direction."

	BEFORE: The second-floor den of Bella and Grant Gerlich of Lawrenceville before it was remodeled by TLC's "Trading Spaces." (Matt Freed, Post-Gazette) AFTER: Bella Gerlich reads in her transformed study/den, which was made over by her neighbors. The redesign included cushions for the coffee table and new chairs. (Doreena Balestreire, Post-Gazette) Click photo for larger image.

With the two cherry breakfronts that held Stern's collection of crystal gone, Bielec had to create a display space for photos and collectibles. In keeping with the Santa Fe theme, he had Pennington build a long, rustic-looking shelf from a pine board that the Gerlichs sanded, painted and "aged" with hammers.

The camel-back couch was padded for a fuller look and then slipcovered in tan-colored ultra-suede and topped with chenille pillows; the glass coffee table was replaced with four suede hassocks Bielec found at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

To leave a touch of the show behind (it's good karma), Bielec had Gerlich paint a large feather freehand on a piece of cardboard that was later framed and hung on the wall.

The $1,000 budget didn't leave much money for artwork, so Bielec scoured the rest of the house for something Southwesterny. He struck gold in the master bedroom: a large bow and arrow Stern got at an Indian expo and two Carol Grigg prints from a gallery in Santa Fe. He also grabbed an antique chair that Stern had hidden in the basement and placed it next to the window.

So what happened at the reveal? Smiles and no tears, luckily. Stern and the Gerlichs gathered with friends last Saturday night at Blue Moon in Lawrenceville to watch the episode's premiere. Nearly two months later, nothing's been removed, painted over or thrown into the Dumpster. Stern has even built on Bielec's design with a few new pieces.

"It's a whole different feel," she says. "People have a tendency to hang here more."

Though she admits she's still adjusting to the changes, the room grows on her more every day.

"It's set up more for conversation," she says.

Bella Gerlich, who jokes that even wood on top of cinder blocks would have been an improvement over her dorm-style den, is even more pleased.

"We were totally flabbergasted," she says of her new room. "It's just fab-o. Everyone who's seen it thinks it's great, too."

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