Senior to receive possible 15 minutes of fame

Senior Jennifer Robertson may get her 15 minutes of fame Sunday May 17 with the airing of ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition finale at 8 p.m. The show finishes the season building a home in Indianapolis, where Robertson volunteered on the worksite. She cited three places where viewers might catch a glimpse of her on their television sets:

1) One of the designers, Michael, explains to the camera that they were putting bricking on the house and Robertson was in the background handing bricks to other volunteers for background movement.

“They shoot everything three times, so we had to hand these bricks three times,” Robertson said. “We ran out of bricks, so we just started stacking the same bricks on the ground and kept handing that pile to each other.”

2. In the back of the house, the team built a basketball court for the kids. They painted the words “Packhouse 2000,” the name of the program Bernard McFarland created to help neighborhood kids keep learning outside of school, on the court. During that shoot, Robertson, her sister, and senior Stephanie Simpson pretended to plant flowers in the back.
“We didn’t have any flowers, so we were actually just patting wet ground with our hands for 15 minutes,” Robertson said.

3. During the final reveal of the house to the McFarlands, the community and volunteers come out to help welcome the family back from their Paris vacation. Robertson created the only French sign, one that read “Welcome Home” in French.

“Mine was the only one that was panned,” Robertson said. “The camera was like two inches from it.”

Senior volunteers with Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

“Put together one house, a deserving family, several opinionated designers, seven

days and what do you get? The answer is Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” ABC Television Network pitches for its hit Sunday night show. Add 4,200 Indianapolis area volunteers and you’ve got the season finale of the television show, shot in the downtown Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood March 28 through April 4.

Senior Jennifer Robertson watches the show whenever she can win her family TV battle, so when she saw volunteer opportunities available for the Indianapolis finale while watching the news, she jumped at the chance. The news broadcast led her to a website where she filled out a volunteer form with a friend. Even if volunteers had no experience in construction, they could still give needed help.

“There was a place where you could put whether you had specialized skills, like if you were a professional dry-waller, but they tried to get everyone who wanted to volunteer onto the site to help,” Robertson said.

While Robertson was only assigned one shift, she ended up volunteering three times. Shifts ran eight hours or until a volunteer was too tired to work.

“You could always tell when a new flock of volunteers would come in,” Robertson said. “There’d be a whole bunch of energetic people flying around.”

Located on the near northeast side of Indianapolis, the house belongs to the McFarland family, chosen for father Bernard McFarland’s heroic work with Indianapolis kids. According to www.estridgeextremedream.com, Bernard created a program called  “Pack House 2000” that was dedicated to “helping exercise the minds and expanding the dreams” of these kids through the formation of reading groups and field trips around the city to places like libraries, museums, and cultural events.

“The theme of this season is ‘Heroes,’ and he was like a neighborhood hero to the kids,” Robertson said.

The week started with the infamous 9 a.m. wake-up call from show host Ty Pennington to the McFarland family, who was sent to Paris for a week’s vacation just hours after learning they had been selected. Volunteers then flooded the worksite, where they assisted a team of designers and Carmel-based Estridge homebuilders to tear down the unsafe house and begin work on a new house and separate library for Bernard.

According to Robertson, most of the unspecialized volunteer help worked with clean-up. Construction workers would throw trash into large piles that volunteers would then transport to the garbage. Others helped work on the neighborhood, too, with the planting of trees and paving of alleys.

Robertson herself helped to set up barricades, clean up trash, and move bricks, but she also had an unusual task.

“I got to make picture frames inside the house, so any frames on the show with pictures of the family, that was me,” Robertson said.

The team only had seven days to complete the project, a tough task, but one that’s been done many times on the show. People are constantly working, so as soon as the foundation was laid, walls were going up, then drywall, and so on.

“One of the guys told us that it normally takes about four months to build a house, so every day to build that house is condensed into one hour,” Robertson said.

Robertson cited meeting designer Paul DiMeo as one of the highlights of the experience as well as a conversation with a local woman about the impact Bernard had on their neighborhood, but her favorite part was the reveal.

During the reveal, the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition bus parks in front of the newly-built house and with a crowd chant of “Move that bus!” drives forward to reveal the house to the family.

“When they moved the bus, Bernard saw the house and fell to his knees, then hugged his kids and then ran down the street and hugged everyone,” Robertson said. “It was really sweet and touching and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

To maybe catch a glimpse of Robertson or see the reveal yourself, tune into ABC on Sunday May 17 at 8 p.m.