Extreme Makeover

You know Paul DiMeo as the caring carpenter and designer from television's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. We caught up with him by phone for a glimpse of the man behind the makeovers. Question: Your official Web site says you were the first to cry on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Tell me about that. Answer: Does it really say that? My word. I need to change that! Yes, I cried during the pilot. I cry pretty easily. I'm a bit of a crybaby. They're tears of joy. Q: So you're a sensitive carpenter.

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. - A crew working on a boarding house for homeless women veterans got a hand Thursday from first lady Michelle Obama during filming of an episode of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. " Wearing a sleeveless blue top, green capris and green sneakers, the first lady was cheered during her visit by hundreds of people after a crowd waited for hours in searing heat for a glimpse of her. But the early-afternoon heat and excitement got the best of some and a handful of people fainted, requiring the care of emergency medical crews.

I WAS 16 years old, just out of high school, when I bought a 1968 Dodge Charger in 1985. I got it in West Phily for $150 from a woman. There were 53,000 miles on it. It sat in her driveway for 5 years before that, because someone stole the battery, and she figured it would be too much too fix at the time. I drove the car until 1994 when I started replacing a lot of parts. The motor couldn't take all the add-ons and well, the car was in storage until 2005. After 11 years of swap meets, Internet shopping and dealing with muscle-car supply companies, I finally got all the parts I needed to restore the car. It took a year and a half to disassemble and restore.

After the television crews left town and the attention died down, Victor Marrero and his five sons were left with more than a dream home. Their five-bedroom house, built by an army of volunteers from the hit TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, also came with some hefty bills. Living on a small pension and staggering under the weight of old debts and new taxes, Marrero said he panicked this week and briefly listed the house for sale. "I gave up. I gave up out of desperation.

This Dr. Phil is a bunch of hooey. He seems to be always on the scene with his TV pop psychology sell. He showed up at Britney Spears' hospital bed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles last month after the pop vixen imploded - again, and after he had pitched a show to Spears' parents under the guise of helping their daughter. (He didn't do much for Alycia Lane four years ago, except make her teary, when he dedicated a show to helping the recently fired CBS3 anchor handle her divorce.

About 200 cheering construction volunteers, clad in blue or black T-shirts and brilliant white hard hats, marched down a normally quiet Levittown street like a giddy circus parade yesterday morning. And then they did it again, and again, their choreographed fist-pumping and on-camera high fives leaving no doubt as to the "reality" of ABC's hit series Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. But no one could question the good will felt by neighbors and the show's producers toward the Kilgallon family, whose termite-ravaged home was flattened at 10:40 a.m., two days into an eight-day production-and-construction blitz set to end Wednesday with a dramatic "reveal.

Five orphaned siblings whose sad story got a Hollywood ending on a reality-TV show filed a lawsuit Wednesday that aims to rip the happy facade off the popular genre. Months after losing both parents, the Higgins siblings were showered with gifts and presented with a new mansion on the ABC hit Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. ABC is continuing to air the episode, the lawsuit alleges, even though the siblings, who range in age from 15 to 22, have been forced from the house and are effectively homeless.

In just one day, a Pennsauken field of dirt sprouted a house. The basement had been excavated, a foundation poured, walls erected, the roof shingled. The day after that, 25 windows were installed, and the house was clad with slate-blue siding. Though it takes months - maybe years - to remodel most kitchens, an army of blue-shirted, hard-hatted volunteers has been working around the clock this week on what must be South Jersey's speediest home construction project. Most of the work was to be finished by today, ahead of schedule.

Jirair S. Hovnanian accomplished one final dream last week -- surrounded by his family, he helped to build a home for free and gave a Camden family a new start. Mr. Hovnanian, a Mount Laurel home builder whose business developed 6,000 homes in South Jersey over four decades, died Tuesday, 10 days after he participated in an episode of ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. "On the morning of his death, my grandfather had been animated and talking about a new project," said grandson, Garo.

CYNICS THAT we are at Tattle, people find it hard to believe we have a soft spot for "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," which makes our tear ducts well up every Sunday night. When the driver moves that bus and the fidgety family that previously was living in a mold-infested outhouse sees their spanking-new, 8,000-square-foot, two-story McMansion with six plasma TVs, a kitchen bigger than the one at Bookbinder's and a landscaped nine-hole golf course on their 10 X 10 back yard, we can't help but get the sniffles.

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. But what if people create a show for ABC called "The Glass House" and it's surprisingly like a show called "Big Brother" on CBS? Can CBS throw stones? Can the network sue? Attorneys for CBS have sent ABC executives a letter warning that "The Glass House" is "strikingly" similar to "Big Brother. " CBS also notes that ABC may be benefiting from the fact that 18 former "Big Brother" staffers and executives are now working on the planned ABC show.

FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. - A crew working on a boarding house for homeless women veterans got a hand Thursday from first lady Michelle Obama during filming of an episode of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. " Wearing a sleeveless blue top, green capris and green sneakers, the first lady was cheered during her visit by hundreds of people after a crowd waited for hours in searing heat for a glimpse of her. But the early-afternoon heat and excitement got the best of some and a handful of people fainted, requiring the care of emergency medical crews.

CLEARWATER, Fla. - Hitting a pitched baseball is supposed to be the single most-difficult athletic feat. So, if nothing else, Joe Savery has raised the degree of difficulty as he attempts an extreme makeover of his career. The Phillies' No. 1 draft choice in 2007, a lefthander out of Rice whom team officials at the time likened to Cole Hamels, reported to the Carpenter Complex this past weekend listed among the position players instead of the pitchers. It goes without saying that the 25-year-old didn't make this decision because of all the success he was having.

At precisely 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, the NFL deadline for reducing rosters to the 53-man limit, the Eagles had a little problem with the two-minute drill again. It doesn't appear that anyone threw up this time, but the deadline passed while the Eagles were completing the packing slip that would ship Stacy Andrews to Seattle to, as Buddy Ryan used to say, "allow him to get on with his life's work. " The deal wasn't completed until 6:03 p.m., and the NFL front office, those sticklers, forced the Eagles to remove someone else from the roster to account for the 180-second delay.

Real estate agent Diane Williams is always amazed by how much reality TV house-hunters watch. "My buyers will walk into a house and immediately comment, 'Oh, this house has been staged,' just as they see it done on television," said Williams, who sells newly built and older homes out of Weichert Realtors' Spring House office. "So many people watch . . . that their expectations of how a house should 'show' have been heightened," she said. And she warns sellers to step up their game accordingly.

You know Paul DiMeo as the caring carpenter and designer from television's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. We caught up with him by phone for a glimpse of the man behind the makeovers. Question: Your official Web site says you were the first to cry on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Tell me about that. Answer: Does it really say that? My word. I need to change that! Yes, I cried during the pilot. I cry pretty easily. I'm a bit of a crybaby. They're tears of joy. Q: So you're a sensitive carpenter.

'Where my single ladies at?" Chris Brown asked over the screams of the Electric Factory crowd on Sunday night. "You know, your boy's single, too. " It's hard to imagine there was a person at the sold-out show, right down to the bouncers and bartenders, who didn't know that Brown is currently unattached. Even people who can't sing a note of Brown's songs know that his relationship with fellow R&B singer Rihanna ended in February, when he was arrested for assaulting her. Brown, who pleaded guilty to a felony charge, avoided jail time, but the cultural ramifications were not so easily escaped.

OUR WITTY yet cynical nature aside, Tattle is a big softie. That "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" gets us nearly every week. Who wouldn't feel a twinge of something when a family of 12, many of them without arms, legs or working organs, living in an the equivalent of a porta-john, gets to see a new home - their new home - that would make Bill Gates jealous. It seems, however, that the mortgage crisis has reached even the creations of Ty Pennington - how about that new bedding line, by the way. (Insert Sears ad here.

After the television crews left town and the attention died down, Victor Marrero and his five sons were left with more than a dream home. Their five-bedroom house, built by an army of volunteers from the hit TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, also came with some hefty bills. Living on a small pension and staggering under the weight of old debts and new taxes, Marrero said he panicked this week and briefly listed the house for sale. "I gave up. I gave up out of desperation.

In the end, it was not Carl Dranoff's bulging portfolio of urban redevelopment projects that won him the job late Wednesday of reviving Ardmore's well-worn business district. It was the outsize ambition of a competitor. Edward Lipkin had proposed a $300 million makeover of the Main Line village's downtown, replete with a six-story hotel and office tower straddling the railroad tracks. But on March 4, just eight weeks after Lower Merion Township commissioners selected him to lead the transformation, Lipkin bailed out of the project, citing uncertainty about amassing the necessary financing in a tight credit market.