Who Actually Wins (and Keeps) the HGTV Dream Home?

I can imagine them perfectly. A minivan opens to let out a family of four. There is a mother, a father, and a pair of boys with freckles on sunburned cheeks—or perhaps just flush with excitement. An architect and two designers welcome the family to a house of wood and stone. The architect says, “Welcome to your HGTV Dream Home!” And the mother folds in half in the circular driveway.

Or perhaps they are a sweet couple. The film crew zooms in on their hands clasped together—before the hands separate and are brought in front of their mouths. They too fall to their knees in front of the home. An interior decorator says, “Welcome to your HGTV Dream Home!” But the couple is too hysterical to hear much else.

There was one thing my entire family dreamed of, and that was winning HGTV’s Dream Home. For years, every day we could, we entered the annual sweepstakes. We tuned in for every episode, where architects and designers would beam at their hard work, the camera sweeping over bathrooms and zooming in over the faucets and the showerheads, everything opulent and mother-of-pearl shiny.

In 2006, this dream became an obsession. You see, my father grew up in the Midwest, where one summer I passed out from heat exhaustion, waking with orbs in my vision; in another season, I had to thaw my toes after walking through the snow in sneakers. My mother grew up in South Florida, never more than thirty minutes away from the Atlantic Ocean; her comfort depended on air grown thick with humidity and salt. And in 2006, the Dream Home was located just outside of Asheville, North Carolina, where my mother’s joints would not rebel and purple and my father wouldn’t sweat through his shirts year-round. We needed this home. We deserved this home.

If you think about something often and hard enough, it eventually calcifies into a belief that it is already yours. We actually believed those walls would house us. We called our cousins telling them that we would host them for the holidays, and that our new house had enough beds that no one would need to sleep on the floor. I cried in front of the television when the screen showed the view from the living room: rolls of heaving earth covered in the strong trees I saw in children’s books—not the melted trees of Florida, reaching out of black brackish water, dripping in Spanish moss. At night, I focused my eyes on three bubbles on my popcorn ceiling and pictured the Dream Home in my mind: its walls of layered stones, the wooden columns in the ceiling.

“Please,” I whispered, “please let us have this house, where we don’t need to worry about hurricanes taking the bedrooms or lakes flooding our kitchen.”

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HGTV’s annual Dream Home sweepstakes began in 1997 with a house in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Every year since, one lucky winner is chosen out of millions of entries: in 1998 there were 2.5 million entries; in 2016 there were around 127 million entries. The prize: usually $250,000 in cash, a car (and an occasional boat, as was seen in the 2016 property on Merritt Island, Florida), and the home itself, typically valued around one million dollars.

Who really wins the Dream Homes? Grand prize winners include: a Sara Lee truck driver, a beauty salon manager, and someone who, prior to winning the Dream Home in 2010, lost their home in Hurricane Katrina. Certainly, it stands to reason, someone who can afford to spend millions of dollars on a house outright is not someone who needs to win one in a game of chance.

It is also important to note that the winner does not receive a brand-new home and a brand-new home only. They are also responsible for federal income taxes (which can be around $700,000), state income taxes, property taxes, and maintenance. As of January 2021, only six of the first twenty-one sweepstakes winners were able to live in their Dream Home for longer than a year. A few took out mortgages so that they could live in the homes; some filed for bankruptcy. If the winner opts for the cash alternative, the Dream Home crew is usually able to sell the home in a month, sometimes in days. Though the new owners remain nameless, they purchase the homes at or around the price that HGTV deems the houses worth, but “rarely at full value.”

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There are several reasons not to paint a room. Expenses need to be considered; you do not merely paint a room, but you prime a room and line a room with thick protective tape. There is time and health: If you work multiple jobs—perhaps caring for children—you can’t be expected to peel off your shoes at the front door and paint a room. You cannot have bouts of vertigo, and the scent of paint can’t induce spools of migraine to coil around your temples. Your taste could fluctuate, and you could find yourself pestered by the crimson you chose and wishing instead for cool blue. You could stain your duvet or never find one that complements your walls. The house could be a temporary home. Why would you paint a room that will not hold you for long?

My bedroom remained white and characterless for the entirety of my youth. As a child, I delighted in thinking of rooms that altered their color based on who was inside, like Sleeping Beauty’s dress flashing between pink and blue on the dance floor. When no one is looking, the dress sighs and releases into a crisp white. And so my room was white because it did not need to impress me. We had an understanding, and it could relax.

It is also important to note that the winner does not receive a brand-new home and a brand-new home only.

I had a friend whose mother was an interior designer, and their house was eclectic. Whenever I came over, her mom played a CD of classical music sprinkled with bird calls that came out through speakers nested in the ceiling. From what I can recall, the walls in their house were either clotted red or cinnamon, with mismatched furniture sprinkled around like toys.

One day, after my parents came to pick me up from my friend’s house, we passed by an antique wooden desk on the side of the road. I can’t remember how we got it home, if my parents collectively lifted it into the gut of the minivan, if my head was pressed against the glass or if I watched from outside. I do remember the impressive weight of the desk against the beige carpet in my bedroom. The conflict between the wood and the white. The ornate edges. We placed it under the window, and the green and red of royal poincianas outside would burst into the room above the earthy desk. I contained a diorama of the world in my bedroom.

It did not take long for tiny translucent wings to collect around the heavy desk. At first, I plucked them from the fibers of the carpet and tossed them into the toilet, the wings like little buoys on the water’s surface. Eventually, I brought one of the carcasses of the winged insects to my mother. She considered the body on top of a quilted paper towel. Termites.

Our house was tented and fumed, to stop the insects from eating at the structure of our home. When they were exterminated, we placed the desk at the side of the road. Rid of the color that infected our home, there was a return to white.

A house does not bulge when infected. There is no fever, no bending of the spine. There were no new creaks; the walls did not thin. After the fumigation, everything looked exactly as it did before. As a child, I found it surprising that trees don’t get soggy when wet, that despite the hurricanes and humidity, when a tree is hit by lightning and branches are snapped and thrown in the wind, their innards are light and dry.

To protect themselves from the strong winds, newer houses are made of cement. The top floor of our house was made of wood, and so whenever a hurricane came, all five of my family members crawled into the downstairs bathroom without a window, knowing that if we left anything of value upstairs, it could be swept away. Yet every hurricane season, we peeled ourselves out of sleeping bags while my father unscrewed steel shutters from the windows, letting the outside spew in. The house never folded into itself. The lake never crept into the house, though I dreamed of gators circling my bed.

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One of my favorite episodes of Dream House is the one that shows the North Carolina Project Room in the 2006 Dream Home, the home that was meant for us. Sunlight pours through the windows, casting spotlights on various desks suited for various projects: one with a laptop, another with a sewing machine, the last with children’s crafts. A room with at least three desks. The host speaks of how important the wall color is; here it is pumpkin-spice orange. The vibrant color is meant to “kick you in the butt,” giving you creative energy. In every other room, the walls are neutral—olive or beige. But the windows, floor to ceiling in some rooms, allow the greenery of the outside in.

If we moved to North Carolina and away from South Florida, I swore I would not mourn the trees that we planted in my youth, the ones that quickly eclipsed my own growth, at first angular and awkward in their childhood. I would not care about the tabebuia that fell in a Florida hurricane, nor would I think of its blushing flowers scattered on the ground like pink pimples. I would not care about the carrotwood that we cut down after its roots burst through the grass and reached under the foundation of our home. I would not think of the palm tree that we planted, the one that was struck by lightning and blackened from the inside out before wilting. I would not care about any of those things, would willingly give them up, if—when we moved into our Dream Home. In North Carolina, there would be new landscapes to see, new trees to learn the names of. So certain of winning, I believed it was a sort of destiny, a certainty.

In the 2006 season of Dream House, HGTV introduced viewers to three unsuspecting finalists, giving a glimpse into how much they wanted and needed the house in North Carolina. They were surprised by the hosts and a camera crew in their small homes or in their places of work. A pregnant Sunday school teacher spoke of hopes for a large family house; a grandmother working at JCPenney spoke of retiring.

All three finalists were flown to stand outside of the house; one of the hosts stood in front of a cake shaped like the house to be won. Each finalist selected a key and walked on a red carpet to one of three blue doors. Only one key worked.

On an April night in 2006, a man discovered that he was the winner of the HGTV Dream Home in Lake Lure, North Carolina. The first thing he said in the finale: “If you don’t have a positive attitude, there is nothing but darkness.” The last thing he did was hug his family and wipe away tears after opening the door. He lived in the Dream Home for only three weeks. He sold the house claiming that the electricity bill was more than ten times his usual monthly bill. In September 2006, he said, “It’s a dream that anyone would love to have—owning a house like the Dream Home . . . but then reality sets in.”

“It’s a dream that anyone would love to have—owning a house like the Dream Home . . . but then reality sets in.”

Who is meant to win these Dream Homes? Of the forty million entries for the 2006 Dream Home, how many were families for whom the annual taxes of nineteen thousand dollars is a nightmare?

We never did win any of the Dream Homes, though we entered for years until the Charleston, South Carolina, sweepstakes in 2013. Every year, my parents said, “Thank god, because what would we do with all of this?” gesturing to the floral couch, the heavy kitchen table, its five wooden chairs. I did not paint my room until I needed to move back to my childhood bedroom for a difficult year in college. I rolled multiple coats of brown over the white. Desk brown. Tree-bark brown.

I looked at the hardened hope that sat inside of me and swore that my parents never let me paint my room because they thought we were going to move, perhaps to that beautiful home in North Carolina. My parents don’t remember saying this to me. They say that, if they did, it was probably an excuse to keep me from making a mess of my room.

Looking at my ceiling, they were right. I painted my room as an adult, and there are marks of brown against the popcorn ceiling from when I was negligent with the roller. What if I decided to paint my room a vibrant pink when I was ten years old? And what if my taste changed? What if we needed to move? What if we did win that house? Would my parents have selected the right key? If they did, I can imagine having my cheeks brushed with makeup as the camera crew prepares to film. I can imagine bringing my hands to my mouth, crying.

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