The Money Pit Makes Some Money

I'm taking a bit of a detour from the Before and After posts today.  My husband and I like to refer to our old home as "The Money Pit".  Most everyone who owns an hold home can empathize, I'm sure.  Even though we have renovated almost the entire house, there are always things that are leaking, breaking, cracking, etc.  It just comes with owning an old home and we're okay with that.

However, when an opportunity presented itself, last December, for our "Money Pit" to make some money, we jumped on it.  My husband's cousin's son (you're following me here, right) works for a marketing company that was looking to shoot a web based commercial for Similac baby formula.  They were searching for an older home with character and a big kitchen as a location for the shoot.  Nick (aka my husband's cousin's son) so kindly recommended our house.  After a few visits by the location scout, the director and a several others, our house was chosen.  It all happened very fast and just to make it even more interesting, the shoot took place two weeks before Christmas.  Fortunately, we didn't have to take down our tree or any other holiday decorations.

It was a crazy three days, but so much fun to see the whole thing unfold.   I'll admit that I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to our house, so turning it over to 30 people to do what they wanted with it, was a bit hard for me at first.  Once the person in charge showed up on the first morning with a check in her hand, I got over it really quickly.   On the second morning of the shoot, we woke up to a rather large snow storm.  My first thought was, who can I pawn my children off on for the entire day.  I tried letting my four year hang around the first day, but as soon as he picked up a very expensive piece of lighting equipment and started swinging it around like a light sabre, I knew that wasn't going to work out.  Once I sweet talked a few friends into helping out with the kids, everything ran smoothly.  Well, as smoothly as it could with 30 people coming in and out of our house with large equipment and snow all over their feet.  They did a wonderful job of putting everything back in it's place and cleaning up, plus they left us a ton of delicious food each day.  I was really impressed with the entire crew.  I met so many cool and interesting people and I got to see the whole process take place.  What an experience.  Here are a few pictures of the fiasco shoot.

Day one of he shoot (storing some of the equipment in our living room)

Day two of the shoot, they moved most all of our furniture out of the family room for this scene) 

My 8 year old daughter was the "official" photographer that day.

One of the gigantic and ultra bright lights they had outside shining in through the windows

The third floor of our house was used as the wardrobe and make-up area.
This is where all the "stars" of the shoot hung out.

Nick's adorable little baby girl, Ella, made her first appearance in a commercial. 

Ella's equally adorable twin, Alex, was the back-up actor.  Fortunately, Ella's performance went off without a hitch.
So he got to lay around and be lazy most of the day.