"Trading Spaces" Fansite Reopens With Four New Recaps

About two years ago, your webmaster began watching a humble but growing little cable TV design show called Trading Spaces. It had an interesting premise, two neighbors swap rooms for two days and redecorate a room for $1000 or less, with the help of a professional designer and a carpenter.

In spite of our championship of the show (and a lot of good vibes from those who worked within the show), Trading Spaces was on its way to becoming one of cable's biggest hits.

Until the day that people stopped watching it.

Then the show's producers and network got pretty desperate, and started making changes to rekindle people's interest in the show. The winds of change were apparent with the beginning of this season, where there were now a selection of rooms to choose from and one being a jackpot bonus room worth more money, plus a more "verite" feel to the proceedings that made these new episodes a chore to recap.

Now, TLC is on the verge of premiering a new, reformatted Trading Spaces that bears only a vague resemblance to the original format, with the chief difference being that the show has lost its central guiding presence with the dismissal of hostess Paige Davis. We feel that the new TS is going down the wrong road, emphasizing homeowner/designer/carpenter conflict and the sort of pathos that typifies everything that has gone wrong with the genre (see under "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"), rather than the giddy, harmless fun of the original.

For those reasons, Dave and Robair present the new Trading Post Goes Old Skool, which will now feature highlights and recaps from the first four years of the show. It's almost as if Season 5 never happened, with the exception of one celebrity show that hews to the old format as done in Seasons 1-4. We may be expanding the site's focus to include Trading Spaces Family, which has happily stuck with all the original trappings of the 2001 vintage TS, from graphics and theme music to attitude.

We hope you enjoy our take on these older shows, many of which are no longer being aired.