From the farm to the screen: These Waterdown siblings transform farmhouses for HGTV
Billy Pearson and Carolyn Wilbrink grew up on a five-acre farm in the outskirts of Waterdown.
As kids, the brother-sister duo would often visit their grandfather, who lived just around the corner, at his century farmhouse and Pearson and Wilbrink credit their current love for refurbishing farmhouses to their childhood trips to their grandfather's house.
We're farm kids," Wilbrink told The Spectator. We grew up there. We were there all the time."
That love is on full display on Farmhouse Facelift," HGTV Canada's newest show, which Pearson and Wilbrink host. Thirty-seven-year-old Pearson is a construction expert and his 39-year-old sister, Wilbrink, is an interior design wiz. Together, they refurbish, renovate, and transform deteriorating century farmhouses into magnificent modern homes that retain their rustic, antique charm. Farmhouse Facelift" premiered earlier this month and airs weekly on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on HGTV Canada and STACKTV.
Although their journey with farmhouses began with their grandfather, their professional relationship to the buildings started seven years ago. Inspired by her childhood in Waterdown, Wilbrink said she had always dreamt of owning a farmhouse with her husband and four children.
When I got pregnant with our fourth child, I needed to move and we needed something bigger," said Wilbrink. She had been eyeing a farmhouse that was just out of her price range for two years, but her realtor ended up showing her the same property for a more reasonable price. So we pull up at this driveway and I'm like, Oh my God, that's the house that I have been looking at for the last two years."
She bought the farmhouse, but quickly found that it needed some major work done. Fortunately, she had an ace in the hole - her brother. Billy was the only one crazy enough to renovate it with me," she said. He saw the forest for the trees."
Wilbrink's farmhouse was the first one the duo worked on, and it was the beginning of a new shared passion. After spending six months completely redoing Wilbrink's new home, the two started working on more farmhouses and sharing the impressive results of their renovations on Instagram.
They never imagined they would get any sort of clout from it - much less a television show - until a representative from HGTV Canada reached out to them via the photo-sharing app. At first, Pearson thought it was a scam.
I guess I was just pessimistic," said Pearson. It was just too good to be true."
But it was true. After a video interview, the two filmed the show. Wilbrink and Pearson - two squeaky-clean, cheery, self-proclaimed farm kids from small-town Ontario - fit neatly with the network's signature roster of similarly positive programming. For the siblings and the network, it was serendipity.
They just said it was too perfect of an opportunity to pass up," said Wilbrink. The rest is history."
The production team fielded applications from century farmhouse owners, and once the perfect homes were selected, Wilbrink and Pearson got to work. The entire series was filmed in a number of small communities across southern Ontario (including Paris, St. Thomas, and Carlisle). The transformation timeline" for each home was 10 to 14 weeks. Pearson and Wilbrink have both been in the region their whole lives. The two siblings were born in Burlington and raised on their Waterdown farm. Wilbrink now lives in Lynden and Pearson lives in Brantford.
Wilbrink and Pearson take an innovative approach to fixing up farmhouses. They aim to make the farmhouses what they call perfectly imperfect," a synchronized melding of old and new. The process begins with a walk-through the client's home, where the siblings scope out what aspects of the house can remain intact when they inevitably gut the house and build it into something sleeker and more stable. Wilbrink and Pearson say staying within a client's budget can be tricky given the myriad challenges that can come up when renovating a building that is over 100 years old, but that they try to come up with cost-saving measures to stay as close to the budget as possible. But sometimes, cracking open the houses can yield wonderful surprises - one time, the siblings found a stack of 120-year-old love letters hidden in the floor of a farmhouse they worked on.
It's always a challenge because you never what you're going to find once you start opening things up," said Pearson. But for me, that's what I love about it."
Although Wilbrink and Pearson have worked together for 16 years, they both said the show presented a new challenge for them. Wilbrink and Pearson shot 10-hour-long episodes, each featuring its own farmhouse and renovation. Days could run as long as 14 hours, much of which was spent shooting and reshooting moments that would otherwise be candid and private. There were some days I would get cranky," said Wilbrink.
If Carolyn and I were total strangers that got this show, we might have quit," said Pearson. We're siblings, so we just get over it and get back to work."