'Sell This House' heads to Lutz to help couple make over, move their lakeside home

LUTZ

Ralph and Peggy Watts have been trying to sell their sprawling 4,200-square-foot lakeside home for almost a year.

The four-bedroom, three-bath house on Anglers Lane features wood floors, a slate fireplace, a pool and a spa.

Asking price: $575,000.

The housing market may be slow, but that's not their only problem. There's wallpaper in almost every room. Ivy in a bathroom. Flowers and birdhouses in the kitchen. Stripes in a bedroom. Blooms in a hallway.

"Wallpaper is a Realtor's nightmare," said the couple's real estate agent, Elisabeth Flach. "It just dates the house."

The Wattses will soon get help from the A&E show Sell This House, in which experts transform homes to make them more attractive to buyers.

The show will film Tuesday through Thursday, said Flach, who submitted the Watts home for consideration. Producers said this week that they didn't yet have a date for when the show will air.

The Wattses are art teachers for Hillsborough County schools and have lived in the home for almost 12 years. They picked out all the wallpaper themselves.

"My husband likes decoration and not plain things, so we went ahead and wallpapered," said Peggy, who teaches at Hillsborough High School. "But now that we take a look at it, it's really too busy."

The couple decided to downsize because Ralph, who teaches at Cannella Elementary, plans to retire soon. He is 62. Peggy, 58, will retire in a few years.

They listed the house with an agent last summer. That relationship lasted four months. They stuck a Buy Owner sign out front and waited. Last month, Flach, a neighbor, approached them about trying to sell.

She was familiar with the house because the Wattses host Halloween and Christmas parties every year for friends and neighbors. The first thing Flach told them was that the wallpaper would be a problem.

Potential buyers see wallpaper and they immediately think of the work it will take to peel it off, Flach said.

"The new generation — I call them Pottery Barn kids — they are into the more plain and natural and neutral-type things," Peggy said. "So we've got to do a little changing."

The couple started to peel some of the ivy wallpaper from a bathroom, but stopped because, well, it was a lot of work.

Enter Sell This House.

On the TV show, potential buyers are hooked up to microphones and asked to walk around the house and give their opinions. Using the home- owners' existing furniture, crews redecorate, repaint and remove clutter. The same potential buyers are brought back to the house after the work is complete and hooked up to microphones again. This time, cameras roll as they walk through the "new" home.

The show picks up the entire tab for the work.

"We have never won anything in our lives," said Peggy, who has entered raffles, played the lottery and tried her hand at slot machines. "We are just super excited. It's like, wow, it's a dream come true."

Dong-Phuong Nguyen can be reached at nguyen@sptimes.com or (813) 909-4613. This story also appeared in some regional editions of the Times.