‘I leveled up’: Tamara Day’s Kansas City-based ‘Bargain Mansions’ gets a big premiere
Tamara Day is about to get a much bigger platform to showcase the Kansas City homes she overhauls and flips.
The Leawood mom’s hit show, “Bargain Mansions,” launches its third season on Tuesday with a move from cable’s DIY to HGTV, which goes into 39 million more homes.
“I got upgraded,” Day says. “I leveled up.”
Episodes have grown from a half-hour to one hour, and each will feature one Kansas City area house, spanning multiple neighborhoods.
“It hasn’t really changed my process or how we film it necessarily,” Day says. “The audience gets to see more of the houses and a little bit more of our fun that we have. And my family is a lot more involved in it — my kids are more in it. Each episode has a little more personality this season.”
Day lives in Leawood with her financial planner husband, Bill Day, and their four children, ages 7 to 16. On the show, she works alongside her father, Ward Schraeder.
Day’s transformations in the new season include multiple 5,000-square-foot homes, including a 1918 colonial and a 1900 shirtwaist house.
“We’ve got one way up in Kearney — literally as far north as you can go and still be in (metropolitan) Kansas City — and another in Gardner, which is as far south as you can go, and everything in between,” she says, ticking off locations in Hyde Park, Lee’s Summit and old Leawood.
‘I put on my tool belt’
With at least eight episodes this season — and possibly more — Day says she couldn’t have imagined the role she finds herself in growing up in Salina, Kansas.
“I don’t think I had a clue what I wanted to do when I was in high school,” Day says. “I had never met a designer. I never knew a woman in construction. I didn’t know this was a path I could have taken.”
Her family didn’t have a TV until Day was older, so the only home renovation show she recalls watching was the original 2003-12 run of ABC’s “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” (Day recently guest starred on an episode of HGTV’s reboot of the show.)
In hindsight, Day can see some markers that might suggest the career path she’s now on.
Her father was in the welding supply industry and the family moved fairly often, building a new house and living on the first floor while work progressed upstairs.
“One of my youngest memories was sitting in ‘time out’ on the staircase filling holes on the railing after I’d been in ‘time out’ and picked the wood putty out of the holes,” Day recalls. “My consequence was putting the wood putty back in.”
She “learned by doing.”
“Stuff breaks, you’ve got to fix it,” she says. “I didn’t grow up in a home where you called and somebody would come and fix it for you.”
At Kansas State University, Day got a degree in communications — “I like to say a BS in BS” — that was more geared to speech writing than broadcasting. Day’s jobs after college were in sales. The closest she’d gotten to TV before “Bargain Mansions” was in high school at Southeast of Saline (class of 1994), where she was named “most likely to be a weather girl where the weather is always sunny.”
Day began flipping homes during the 2008 financial crisis. Her husband had a history of owning properties, following in the footsteps of his parents.
“When the economy went in the toilet we had bought our first bargain mansion, an over-5,000-square-foot home that had been foreclosed,” Day says. “It was in wretched condition and I had babies at the time … so I put on my tool belt and started working with a baby in a backpack.”
She’d also buy furniture at garage sales and paint the pieces in her driveway while her children played nearby. After amassing enough furniture, she’d open her house to the public twice a year with the refurnished furniture for sale. Coming into her home, people liked Day’s kitchen and started hiring her to help them redesign their kitchens or other rooms, all the while she was buying, renovating and reselling homes.
TV, a store, a family
Six years ago she met TV producer Matt Antrim (“Joe Millionaire”) when he moved back to Kansas City from Los Angeles. After he heard about her house renovation work, he wanted to make a TV show that followed Day on the job.
“I said, OK, but there’s no TV shows (in production) in Kansas City, and that’s a really long shot,” Day recalls. “It didn’t seem realistic or an actual option, but I said yes because it sounded like fun, no harm, no foul.”
The “Bargain Mansions” production company, Conveyor Media, and post-production are based in L.A., but most of the 15 crew members on set are based in Kansas City. With them, Day hops from one house to another, with eight houses in different stages of renovation over a nine-month production cycle.
Despite COVID-19 upending most TV productions, “Bargain Mansions” was still filming around Kansas City as of April 3 with a skeleton crew of fewer than 10 people working six feet apart.
The difference between Day’s life before “Bargain Mansions” and since abound. Her father is more involved in the TV show than in her renovations pre-TV, but Day notes, “He’s my dad. When I need him, he’s always there and has always been.”
Mostly, there’s just a lot more work. On top of the TV show, in December she opened Growing Days Home store in Prairie Village.
“There’s only one of me and eight houses and four children and a retail store and a design firm — I have a handful of designers working for me full time designing for clients’ projects — so now I get to do the fun things I like to do and I jump in and help where I can on projects,” Day says.
“I definitely imagine all my contractors would like it if I didn’t micromanage it as much as I do. And I know production would appreciate it if I just walked in and filmed and didn’t have so much input on what is happening on every project, but I know these projects inside and out very well.”
Freelance writer Rob Owen: RobOwenTV@gmail.com or on Facebook and Twitter as RobOwenTV.
Where to watch
The new season of Tamara Day’s “Bargain Mansions” will premiere at 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 14, on HGTV.
This story was originally published April 12, 2020 at 6:00 AM with the headline "‘I leveled up’: Tamara Day’s Kansas City-based ‘Bargain Mansions’ gets a big premiere."