Brought down to earth and forced to watch HGTV for a few days, an alien might rightly hightail it back to his or her planet bewildered. What's with these humans and their conflicts? On one hand, viewers are shown and told how to inject personality into their rooms via chartreuse walls, sari-draped ceilings, and family photos. On the other, designers so obnoxious you could slap them (except they might like it) are slagging off homeowners' tastes in chairs, curtains, and wall finishes before ousting every last vestige of originality, dumbing down houses until they become the equivalent of the homogenized, teeth-straightened, hair-blonded, lacklustre bimbos that populate reality-TV shows. But, hey, it'll sell faster, right? While the bile is flowing, I tuned out of House and Home in a Toronto heartbeat when an admittedly extreme minimalist designer said he "thinks penitentiary" in his own place. No Martha comments, puh-leeze. Let me also boast that I've mastered the split-second timing needed to hit the remote to avoid what's known in the trade as "the reveal", the moment when Janet and Joe raise the blindfolds and see their "ohmiGAWD" transformed room.

To be fair, HGTV does have its uses as long as you keep a notebook at hand and are prepared to pass, Alice-like, through the screen and go inside the designer's head to figure out the core idea behind what you're seeing on TV. Wotta concept. Call it What Were They Thinking?

Here's what I mean. Design on a Dime features a budget of $1,000, the by-now-clichéd Keystone Kops speed-up that condenses a day's work into a half-hour and an emerald-green living room from hell. Owners Monica and Jennifer want Spanish-rustic for their California bungalow: "a room that celebrates their Mexican heritage". Presto, the walls become terra cotta and the TV hides in an entertainment centre-so far, so obvious, but two usable ideas do emerge.

Concept No. 1 in designerthink is "multiples". Mounting eight wrought-iron candle sconces on a wood panel stained to match shutters added at either side might not be your idea of a visual good time, but the basic thought is a sound one. Compatible groups are always more fun than being on your own. The trick is to seek out identical triplets or quintuplets (stylistically, as Japanese egg packagers know, odd numbers have it visually over evens) or siblings with a strong family resemblance. Think of a row of cylindrical glass vases-Ikea, dollar store, they're everywhere-lined up on a windowsill with cosmos or geranium flowers from your balcony in each one. Imagine a stack of cushions in different shades of Vancouver's favourite sage green, or wicker baskets rounded up from various rooms and corralled in one corner.

Programs that deal with oversized empty rooms are irrelevant to most of us. So three stars to Mission Organization for taking on the double whammy of a small room (about four metres narrowing to two in the episode I watched) and mind-blowing clutter. Cogent advice for those aiming to get out from under their stuff came from host Gail O'Neill, who suggested sorting those heaps and mounds into three categories: keep, donate, and toss. Double points because she let the owner hang on to her funky but nonfunctioning pink 1950s fridge as a storage unit.

If trashing five years of Architectural Digest and every term paper you ever wrote makes your heart flutter, you also need more storage. Tuning in to Rooms That Rock, I watched a small Pepto-Bismol-pink teenage room raised to legal age by a palette change and bed elevation. What were the designers thinking? In the case of the bed, about the vast amount of potential storage space that hides beneath your mattress along with the dust bunnies. Raising your bed even a few centimetres (wood blocks would do it) frees up a potential storage locker for skis, out-of-season clothing and the bargain-but-bulky 48 rolls of toilet paper you grabbed at the drug store.

Designers think obliquely. Just because it's an old iron gate doesn't mean it can't be painted to go on the wall, have hooks glued to it, and display fancy purses (which is what the Rooms That Rock folks did). Design on a Dime was just as thick with clever, simple, and cheap ideas, such as transforming a blah beige lampshade by painting it caramel, cross-hatching it with a deeper shade, then scratching it with a toothpick to create a weathered-leather look. Keep your eyes open at yard sales for candidates you can refurbish.

That is, if you ever make it off the couch.