Over the 320 different episodes that “Property Brothers” Drew and Jonathan Scott have filmed, they have only had to walk away from a homeowner once in the middle of filming.
“They were trying to do something illegal,” said Drew Scott during an HGTV panel at the Television Critics Association summer press tour on Thursday. Scott was joined by his brother, Jonathan, and the network’s newest sibling pair, Leanne and Steve Ford on the panel.
The Scotts delved more into what happened on that ill-fated shoot. “Sometimes I think they cast people to give me grey hair, but 99 percent of the home owners are fantastic and wonderful,” said Jonathan. “And there’s the 1 percent that’s really sometimes a pain.”
But for this particular shoot, the brothers say, it wasn’t that the homeowner was a nasty person, but that he was dead set on making a poor investment that would’ve run afoul of property laws. Considering the homeowner’s career, you think he would’ve known better.
“It was a firefighter,” Jonathan Scott continued. He lamented that the firefighter was going to have fellow fireman come and help with the renovations. “Oh this will be the sexiest episode ever,” Jonathan remembers.
But Drew Scott explained that when they were house hunting, the firefighter was particularly set on a neighborhood that used to be an old landfill, and the soil was not properly attended to. “All the houses in the neighborhood were sinking. Literally sinking,” Drew said. He continued that specific house this person wanted had different ceiling heights in the front and the back. The front was a standard height. The back? “[It] had about about a 4 and a half foot ceiling.”
Jonathan chimed in that the guy wanted him to “just level the floor out, don’t worry about the structure.” He couldn’t do that, because that would’ve been illegal, he claimed.
“We ended up walking away, and unfortunately he ended up buying that house,” said Drew.