EXCL: Dave and Jenny Marrs Reveal ‘Annoying’ Reality of Filming at Home
“Fixer to Fabulous” stars Dave and Jenny Marrs have proudly documented their impressive property-flipping careers on HGTV for nearly a decade. Yet, they now confess they wish they had kept one key aspect of their lives private: their Arkansas family home, which they regret allowing the cameras to enter.
The 1903-built, five-bedroom, three-bathroom, 2,400-square-foot restored farmhouse in Bentonville, AK, currently pulls double duty as both the Marrs family home and a regular filming location for “Fixer to Fabulous,” which is now in production on its eighth season, with new episodes expected later this year.
Since the show’s inception in 2019, Dave, 46, and Jenny, 47, have always allowed filming to take place inside their real residence as they go about their business restoring, remodeling, and preserving homes across Northwest Arkansas.
But now, speaking to Realtor.com® as part of their partnership with Aleve, the married contractor and designer duo are revealing how it’s become a bit of a pain to constantly have cameras inside their personal space.
“It’s annoying,” states Jenny. “I wish we had a show home. Wouldn’t that be nice to have, like, the fake house that we only went and filmed in and then we had our real house? Most people, even if you work from home, you can still have a little bit of separation of work and life, and we have none.”
“We can’t segment off just one little section of our house when they’re shooting,” adds Dave, as he points out the “totes being packed for camp” and other physical evidence of their five children—twin sons Nathan and Ben, adopted daughter Sylvie, daughter Charlotte, and son Luke—that is scattered throughout the interior of their historic property.
Of course, opportunities to capture the Marrses on camera in their natural environment have only increased in recent years.
The Emmy-nominated “Fixer to Fabulous” has become one of the most-watched series on HGTV and has led the couple to star in spinoffs such as “Fixer to Fabulous: Welcome Inn” and “Fixer to Fabulous: Italiano,” while also making appearances on other network productions, including “Rock the Block” and “Home Town Takeover.”
Over the years, Dave and Jenny’s kids have all made countless cameos in a number of episodes. However, some of the Marrs children have recently made the decision to take a step back—a choice their parents fully support.
“We have three teenagers now, one preteen, and then Luke’s 7, so they’ve just grown up around it. But now they’re like, ‘We don’t want to be on camera,’” shares Jenny.
“This season, you won’t see as much of the kids,” she adds. “Luke doesn’t mind and Char doesn’t mind, but the bigs are like, ‘Yeah, no, we’re not going to be on camera,’ and we never would force them to be on camera.”
The mother of five acknowledges the production side of the family business can sometimes be difficult to navigate, especially when crew members and equipment crowd up their already full home base.
“Some days, the kids will come home from school and our house has a bunch of cameras, and so it’s a little bit chaotic,” she notes, while also recognizing that complicated logistics come with the territory.
“I kind of wish we didn’t do that, but also, that’s part of it,” says Jenny. “We want to be open and authentic. We do want it to be real. We don’t live in a museum. We live in real life. It’s a challenge, for sure.”
Reflecting the reality of family life and their renovation work on reality TV is a challenge the Marrses take seriously. Beyond being candid about clutter and kids, they’re also incredibly transparent about how it’s been difficult to accurately represent renovation budgets on their show when construction costs have increased so much season after season.
“When we first started this show, we could do a small house renovation where we did the kitchen, one other space, and something on the exterior for $70,000,” starts Dave.
“A kitchen now is $60,000 to start before I even touch anything else, and so a lot of times people might catch an episode of Season 1 or Season 2 because HGTV, they recycle these and play them a lot,” he says, explaining how renovation budgets in earlier episodes seem outdated today.
“It’s also where you live,” adds Jenny. “That is a tricky one. We actually asked this year if we could take out the budget information because it’s so hard, and it’s so hard for people living in different parts of the country, and [seeing it] in a rerun three years later.
“I don’t know if that’s going to happen or not, but it is challenging because every market is so different.”
Then there’s the issue of renovation timelines, and how the truncated TV version of a project’s duration often gives viewers a false sense of what it really takes to pull off a remodel.
“We have a 42-minute episode, and they take hundreds of hours of footage and cram it down,” details Jenny. “We want people to know this is the edited version. There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes … and there’s a lot that happens that doesn’t get shown.
“Like, just sitting here doing billing or ordering, researching lights—that takes hours and hours of work to find the right light for the right space, and it’s just not going to be shown.”
And it’s not just the massive makeovers the Marrses take on for TV that are much more difficult than they appear. As ambassadors of Aleve’s Project DIY campaign, Dave and Jenny want hardworking DIYers who are tackling their own home projects to recognize that hardships come with tasks of all shapes and sizes—even if the inspiration presented on social media makes the process look easy.
“On social media, you’re not seeing people’s failures. You’re seeing it when they succeed and when the project turns out great for the most part,” cautions Dave.
“Don’t compare yourself to anyone else,” he continues. “I’m trying to encourage people [to] start doing things. Start small. Start with a planter bed. Start with paint. If you’re going to do a remodel in your house, great. Start on a small bathroom or a small room that is manageable, that doesn’t disrupt your entire life.”
“Maybe don’t tear down a wall as your first project. Just do small steps that make big changes,” adds Jenny. “Move furniture around. Bring in plants. Those types of projects that aren’t so overwhelming help you gain confidence, and then you can try to tackle the next thing.”
Right now, the Marrses are tackling their own manageable DIY project—a custom enclosure for three ducklings they recently welcomed to their family farm—with Charlotte, 12, leading the charge.
“We had, like, an old Tuff Shed that’s been sitting on the side of our property that I salvaged from a house I tore down years ago,” says Dave. “I drug it over, I put a chicken house in, a greenhouse, and then we put a garden in front of it.
“Charlotte, she loves any animal she could possibly get her hands on, so we got chickens. Then she got ducks, too,” continues Dave.
“So then we were reading about having ducks and chickens together, and it’s fine if they’re all females. But if you have males there, it gets kind of hairy, and so we were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could build a little side enclosure to what we’ve already built for the ducks that has a pond in it?’
“She’s out there forming the pond with her hands, and I’m mixing concrete, and we’re pouring footers, and we’re going to throw up a little structure for the ducks.”
“She laid it all out with rocks,” adds Jenny. “This has been her dream project that. … Now, she and Dave are executing it.”
No matter what difficulties the DIY endeavor might entail, the Marrses seem to agree that the satisfaction they receive from working alongside their children is always worth the headache.
“If my kids, if they want to do something, then I’ll be damned,” says Dave. “We’re going to figure out a way to do it.”
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