WLBT 3 - Jackson, MS: Trading Spaces, One Year Later!

Trading Spaces, One Year Later!

By Cheryl Lasseter
cheryl@wlbt.net

One year ago, TLC's Trading Spaces came to town and four sets of Mississippi neighbors traded houses for two days and completely redecorated a room in each other's home. Have those redecorated rooms stayed intact?

In Ridgeland, Shannon Holy hasn't changed a thing in her India-inspired bedroom, created by Laurie Smith, a Trading Spaces designer and Jackson resident.

"I haven't missed my ceiling fan," quips Holy; Smith is known for removing ceiling fans. Shannon says she loves the cumin and eggplant colors in her bedroom so much, she's carried the theme into her adjoining master bathroom. "What I've done now is had a decorator come help me. It's just all fit together," she says.

In Madison, Donielle Milam hasn't changed a thing in her bedroom, which was also designed by Smith. Milam has encountered a few problems with some of the items brought in by Smith: a pillow sham has frayed, and the massive mirror has cracked. "It's not put on the wall," she says, pointing to the mirror atop a wall shelf. "It's just leaning, and I think the pressure of it (caused the crack), so I just pretend it's antique-looking!" she says.

And next door, the room you can't forget. Six thousand silk flowers on Susan Ridgway's bathroom wall are.... still there! "It's very cheerful!" Susan says. She loves her bathroom, which was designed by Hildi Santo-Tomas. And she says the flowers haven't needed a single dusting yet.

But Susan says she doesn't care for the red Plexiglass that was fastened into her bathroom cabinets with brass tacks. "It's been real shaky. We had to fix that," she says. "That really ruined the cabinet doors." She and her husband removed the tacks and reinforced the red panels with stronger nails.

Susan has made changes in her bedroom as well, with brighter bed linens and walls, and a perfect new picture of a flower, painted by her 19-year-old daughter, an art student in St. Petersburg, Florida.

But the bathroom flowers may not live forever. "One day we will have a flower-picking party, invite everyone we know and start picking flowers," she says with a laugh.

At the fourth household, in Ridgeland, Bob and Debbie Johnson say they've made only one change in their bedroom. Their ceiling fan had been removed by Santo-Tomas, and they put it back.