Every couple has a thing that they're looking for, that they're looking for in each house.

And for us, it was a podcasting space.

Beautiful, historic home.

It's probably a hundred plus years old.

Memphis was founded by Andrew Jackson.

He decided to name it after a city on the Nile in Egypt.

If you have watched the movie the Firm, that's where Tom Cruise has his house.

In the movie the Firm, you don't realize that, like, you're always miked up.

So the sound guy could always hear us.

Like, if I burped or if I did said something and I could see him give a thumbs up, like he was listening to everything I.

I will say filming for House Hunters was kind of a dream come true.

Like, we actually made it.

Welcome to Talk with History.

I am your host, Scott, here with my wife and historian, Jen.

Hello.

On this podcast, we give you insights to our history Inspired World Travels YouTube channel Journey and examine history through deeper conversations with the curious, the explorers and the history lovers out there.

Now, Jen, before we get into the obvious topic, and that is our journey through filming a House Hunters episode, I want to give a quick shout out to Stephanie Barnes, who left us a tip, actually a donation over@talkwithhistory.com so I think I actually went to school with Stephanie, if memory serves, and she actually left a comment.

She said, I spend lots of time in the car with my kids and we all love listening.

Put a little smiley face there.

So I really appreciate it.

Stephanie, thank you so much for leaving the donation.

We really love hearing from our listeners for things like that.

And if you want to kind of drop us a tip, buy us a coffee, you can go to talkwithstory.com There's a support link.

It can be $2, it can be $1, whatever it is.

But we really do appreciate it.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Okay, so obvious topic of the day is something a little bit different.

And that is our episode of House Hunters.

This is the classic.

Everybody asks, like, is this the one they overhaul your house?

No, this is the classic one that's been on for probably 20 years.

You look at three houses, you pick a house, and they film the whole thing.

Yes.

So we had the opportunity, as we were moving from Navy, was moving from Norfolk to Memphis to film this episode.

And the story I like to tell, to kind of kick it off is we're sitting at home in Norfolk and Jen says to me, watching TV in the evening.

And Jen says to me, I think I'm going to apply to be on House Hunters.

And I Just said, yeah, whatever.

I was like, I didn't think in a million years.

Right.

And then the next day she gets a phone call, and the day after that, we're on a zoom call with a field producer, and then it's just off to the races.

Yes.

So that's exactly how it happened.

And I just.

I loved watching House Hunters.

I still watch it now.

It's fun to see the different parts of America and what a home looks like in those areas and the different kind of unique styles to the different parts of the States.

But it also House Hunters International, where you can see what houses look like internationally.

So I just thought it would be fun to show what houses would look like in Memphis.

And we were coming out here anyway.

We were going to look for a house.

We're buying a house.

We hadn't bought a house in a while, so it kind of all lined up well.

And I thought if this was.

If there was a time to do it, this was the time to do it.

And it just worked out really well that it all fit together and it allowed us to talk about the podcast on there, because we were looking for podcasting space.

And this is the podcasting space.

Yeah, that was kind of like the thing.

Every couple has a thing that they're looking for, that they're looking for in each house.

And for us, it was a podcasting space.

We couldn't use the name of the podcast, but we got to talk about the history podcast.

And so to keep this tied to history and to avoid talking about, you know, things that, you know, we're not allowed to talk about technically.

Yeah, we're going to talk about each of the homes that you see.

And if you want to look it up yourself.

Right.

You can jot this down and I'll kind of put some text up on the screen.

But it is season 257.

Yes.

Episode six.

Six staying put in Memphis.

Staying Put in Memphis.

If you want to look it up and you have streaming services and you can, you know, go dvr it.

Stephen Season 257, episode 6 and it's staying put in Memphis.

So we're going to kind of talk about each of the houses that we looked at and actually some of the history, because it was in different parts of Memphis.

And so there is a little bit of history in each of these spots because the very first house we found was this beautiful, beautiful, historic home.

It's probably a hundred plus years old in an actual, like, very historic part of Memphis.

Memphis called Central Gardens.

Yes.

And just know that Memphis is very historic within itself.

Memphis was founded by Andrew Jackson.

He had.

He was from this area, and he had seen the bluff, the flat bluff along the Mississippi.

And because they were going to incorporate it into a city, he decided to name it after a city on the Nile in Egypt.

So Memphis gets its name from Memphis in Egypt.

And so there's a lot of history here, just in the Memphis area.

And we had lived here before, so we knew some of the neighborhoods around here, and we know where the base is and for Scott's commute.

So at first we look at Central Gardens, and it's very much in the name, central to Memphis.

It's.

It's by midtown.

And if you have watched the movie the Firm, that's where Tom Cruise has his house in the movie the Firm.

And it's one of these older neighborhoods of Memphis.

And the house we looked at was a hundred years old and had seen so much history there.

It just had been around for so long.

So it was amazing to get to walk through this home and.

And really look at it and have this opportunity that we could own a piece of this.

Yeah.

And even on the show, they.

They showed kind of up front in the front door.

It has like, a little, like, historic district building badge.

Right.

I mean, it's.

It was just the.

You know, and I'll be honest, they spent a little bit more time on this home, and it still didn't quite do it justice because it was.

It was stunning inside.

It was very old, a little bit choppy, but it was stunning.

And we were actually pretty surprised.

Yeah.

I mean, the detail and the craftsmanship was just amazing.

So Central Gardens was built primary between 1850 and 1930 for the wealthy middle class of Memphis, basically, those.

Those cotton boomers, basically cotton farmers and things like that.

And it was really like a nice area.

And people had larger homes and farms out there.

It was more farmy as well.

It's been now more incorporated to homes.

And you could tell from the architecture that these rooms had just the fine detailing in the woodwork.

And they had these pocket doors that you just don't see everywhere.

It had the stained glass.

It had a beautiful kitchen.

And we just.

We just fell in love with that house.

It was.

It was a little more than we wanted to spend.

And when you get upstairs, you can see how the rooms would have been difficult.

We have three children, and we want to keep it fair.

Plus we have to worry about a primary bedroom for us and podcasting space.

Yeah, it didn't have, like, the.

The Master bath, master bedroom.

That's one of the things I think this is fine to talk about.

One of the things they ask you on the show is, is not to say master bedroom.

Yes.

They ask you to say primary.

Yes.

And that's because I guess the master bedroom has just been used for so many years, they just, they change it.

So that was kind of an interesting thing.

But with that there was no bathroom dedicated to the ma.

The primary, the master master bedroom.

The only bathroom that was attached to a room was that little room that looked like an office which had the laundry in it too.

Yeah, it was, it was very classically historic.

100 plus years old, smaller rooms, actually decent size even, even for.

By today's standards, but just kind of chopped up.

Upstairs they had a third floor that Jen went up there and started talking about, oh, we could install a bathroom, we could do this, we could do that.

I was like, this is, I'm not looking for massive projects like that.

That was one of the things.

Yeah, you could put a primary suite up there.

But again you're on the third floor then, which is a lot of stairs and you could tell there was a very large size room.

But that definitely was like a more than one child room and you could tell that's what it was.

But there was no other bathroom attached to a main bedroom because that's not what they did in the 1850s.

I mean you were lucky to have indoor plumbing.

So you usually had one bathroom.

And even the second bathroom up there looks like it was probably not a bathroom at first.

It was probably a laundry room and they had made it into a bathroom.

So it was one of those places that it would, if you wanted it to fit your lifestyle and be usable, it was going to take some work.

And if you do work in a historic home, you have to up make sure you up keep the integrity of the home.

And doing that works.

It's always more expensive and sometimes you have to get those things approved as well.

Especially when you're in a historic district such as this.

So it's one of those things like the added cost of doing historic renovations is probably like double a normal reserv renovation.

So it was already.

That's the, that's the highest priced house we looked at.

I think it was like 685.

Yeah, it was pretty high.

Now they had converted like what looked to be a two car garage in the back into basically like a suite.

So there was a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom back there.

So kind of like a mother in law suite type space.

And so that would have been a great podcasting space for us.

It would have worked very, very well.

It would have worked well.

But if you remember, we have three small children with a ton of bikes and outdoor equipment.

Yeah.

We need a garage.

We need a garage.

Now.

They had a full size basement in that house I didn't show you.

And it's very.

A little more difficult to access because.

Was it underneath, like the side driveway area?

No, you went in the side door and it was down the stairs.

But very Home Alone esque.

Right.

It was like kind of like scary down there.

And so it was one of those like, are you really gonna, how often are you gonna go down there?

You don't have to go down there for laundry or anything.

Use it for like Christmas storage stuff.

Yeah.

But it was beautiful.

And was there any other kind of history in the area that you wanted to.

No, just like, just know that Central Gardens is like that.

That's where the original mayor lived.

That's where the US Representatives for Memphis have lived there.

The governor's wife.

Right.

Now our governor, his wife is from there.

It's just such a historic part of Memphis.

If you were going to say I live in the historic area of Memphis, the first place people are going to think of is Central Garden.

Yeah.

So it, it was, it was pretty cool.

Now the next house that we, we looked at was out in Arlington.

So Arlington, if you're not familiar with the greater Memphis area.

Right.

Picture Tennessee in your head.

Memphis is in that bottom left corner.

Right.

Arlington is kind of northwest of, of Memphis or sorry, northeast.

And it's actually closer to the base where I work for the Navy.

So that was kind of the big draw there.

If we lived there.

And I know many, many people that live there.

I work with a lot of, you know, fellow officers and enlisted folks who live in the greater Arlington area.

That would have been a much shorter commute because from downtown Memphis or the third home, it's about a 40 minute drive out to the base.

So this was Arlington.

It was a newer build home, was probably four or five years old.

Yeah.

You know, maybe.

But everything's brand spanking new now.

A lot smaller.

A lot smaller.

I think we were going to buy from original owner.

Yeah.

And so that wasn't a lot of story there, which I didn't care for.

And you could tell it really was.

It looked like only two people really lived there and they had like maybe their grandkids come and stay.

Yeah.

But it was so it had all like the outlets that you want and had all the modern wiring and all that nice stuff.

And that part of me was just like, ah, it would be so nice to buy new.

Yes, I mean, that's true.

So when you think of Memphis, Memphis is about 600,000 people.

And so that's Central Gardens.

It's the second most popular populous city in Tennessee beside Nashville.

Arlington is only about 15,000 people.

So it's, it's older.

It got its name in 1900.

It was first incorporated in 1878.

It's named for Arlington National Cemetery.

So it gets its name from that.

That's cool.

But it's, it's just not, it's.

It.

You wouldn't have all the amenities as far as shopping and stuff.

It's not as built up.

It's not as built up.

But you are close to the base and you have a bunch of families there who are also base people.

So that's kind of easy for the kids to kind of find friends quickly because everyone's doing that.

And some people like that area because it's not built up.

You can, you can get a newer house with a little bit more land out, out in that, that part of the, the greater Memphis area.

Yeah.

And the house, I mean, the bathroom would be my dream bathroom.

Yeah.

It was beautiful.

It was beautiful.

Like if I was going to build a bathroom, that's exactly how I wanted it to look.

Now we didn't show you the closet attached to that.

That was smaller.

And they don't really show you the garages.

That was a two car garage, but it also seemed smaller.

And like I said, we have tons of stuff with kids so we really need a three car garage.

If.

And this is, even has a garage with the other place.

Didn't.

The, the thing that I really love though is it had no mature trees.

Yeah.

This is what you see in the Central Gardens house is the squirrels.

And since we had lived here before, I've had to deal with squirrels in your attic.

And once they get in your attic, it's like a, it's a nightmare to try to get them out.

Pest control and all that stuff.

And anytime you have tree limbs that are close to your roof or can touch your roof, you're going to get squirrels.

And this had no trees.

So you know, there was going to be no problem with that whatsoever.

It was a little tight in areas.

It was, it was, it was smaller.

So there wasn't quite as much as what we were looking for other than the fact that it was new and close to the base.

Yeah.

And I didn't I don't like a sink in the island.

Like, even there was space.

But the thing about having an island for me is I want an island.

I can completely clear off if I need to.

And with a sink in the island, you're always going to have stuff around your sink to do dishes.

Like, there's always going to be something there.

And I.

It still clutters up the space.

And so I want nothing in my island.

I don't want, like I said in the show, I don't want burners in the island.

I don't want a stove top in the island.

I don't want a sink in the island.

I just want a plain island.

So that had that against it as well.

I will say I love the details of, like, the lantern lighting and you see me talk about that and of course, the granite countertops.

Now to kind of step back and talk a little bit more about what being on the show is like, because I'm sure you're curious.

I mean, this was a full week of filming, right?

And this is pretty obvious because you're wearing different outfits for different days and stuff like that.

And so each house that we visited was a full day of filming, right?

Again, relatively obvious because we're wearing different clothes each day.

We're.

We're filming for eight hours, right?

We had a great crew with producer and videographers and sound guy and production assistant.

And they were just so much fun, actually, to be with.

I was pleasantly surprised.

And we learned a lot.

We learned a lot just kind of from how they did things in kind of how they worked each site each day and what they kind of had to do to prep everything and to make sure it looks good and stuff like that.

So for me, from a production perspective, I was kind of trying to learn as much as I could, but it was really, really interesting.

And then for the first day, what they call, like the slice of life, right?

We got to drive up and film at our friend's house, Chris and Naomi, who we've known here from Memphis before.

So they were excited because they got to, to be on the show and, and their house was actually what we used to do the sit down interview in the, in the very beginning.

So that's a little bit more about what it's like to be on House Hunters.

We were, we filmed for five days.

Five days, eight hours stay.

And always think, like, we're wearing mics.

Like, they put mics on us, they're underneath our shirts, they're taped down.

And then we have to Carry the little pack with us.

And so it was funny that you don't realize that, like, you're always mic'd up.

So even between the scenes were mic'd up so the sound guy could always hear us, like, if I burped or if I did said something and I could see him give a thumbs up, like he was listening to everything.

So you have to be aware.

So it was super interesting.

And when you think about it, right, just from watching it, like, oh, yeah, that kind of makes sense that they would be wearing mics.

But you don't.

Right.

You don't necessarily think about it because the show's been on for so long.

You just kind of watch and you're looking at the houses.

So that.

That was.

Was pretty interesting.

They were great, too.

I will say.

We had a fantastic crew.

By the last day, I had bought everyone gifts.

Like, we got to know each other very well.

They.

They rode bikes with our kids.

Like, they were just a fantastic crew.

It felt almost the close.

Like family.

They were really great.

It was.

It was a good group of people.

So now we'll move on from the Arlington new build.

Right.

So the first home was the historic home.

The second one was the new build.

And the third one ended up being, you know, I'll call it the Goldilocks.

But this was one in Collierville.

And spoiler alert, this is where we actually ended up.

So Collierville, we were looking.

Already had kind of been looking in this neighborhood, but this was probably the largest home that we looked at.

So we.

The last time we were here, we had lived in Germantown.

We didn't look in that area.

And it's kind of like Memphis, Germantown, Collierville.

So this is one more town further out or suburb further east than Memphis.

And we make our decision in that Collierville square.

And I had recommended that because it had won, like most cute town square or most Americana town Square in 2014.

And you kind of see when we walk around it, it is a very cute square.

And Collierville's historic.

50,000 people live there, but it's the second oldest town in Shelby County.

And there's two battles from the Civil War that take place in Collierville.

And one of them is Sherman is here.

And the reason why it's so important is that railroad line runs right through Collierville.

And they're.

The Union protected it from the Confederacy taking it.

And those two battles are the Confederacy tries to take the railroad line there at Collierville twice.

And twice they're rebuffed by the Union.

The first time is with General Sherman, and so they even have his name there.

And if you looked at General Sherman's list of battles, Collierville is listed on there.

So it's kind of neat, its place in American history and its place in the history of the county being one of these older towns.

And when we looked at the house here, it just felt like this one was ticking all the boxes for both of us.

It was historic enough, but new enough.

It had all the space we needed, and it was still an okay drive for Scott.

It was just.

It.

It met both of the things we were looking for.

But this house required the most work.

Yeah, this one, we actually.

We did a fair amount of work to it once we finally got, you.

Know, once we bought it.

Yeah, once we bought it, we.

We ended up kind of opening up a wall downstairs between the kitchen and living room to really kind of open up.

Right.

A little more modern, open, open concept type feel, which actually made it feel a lot bigger in that area.

I mean, we live down there when we're not up here podcasting, but, you know, it has grand columns out front, and I'll put some pictures up on the video just to kind of show a little bit.

I don't know if I can put large clips of the actual TV show itself, because it's hgtv, so it's theirs.

Right.

But it ticked all the boxes.

It was an area we had already been considering because we had been in Germantown relatively close, so we were actually close to some of our old friends.

And so that was another big driver for us.

We had to replace all the carpet in the entire house, every bit of carpet, because the other carpet, you couldn't even live with it.

It was so dirty and worn down.

And in the boy's bathroom, half of the bathroom was carpeted and the other half was tiled, so we had to retile the whole thing.

And because I tried to match the tile in there, but that tile was 30 years old and they couldn't find it anymore.

So we retired the whole bathro.

And then you'll see in Madison's bedroom was popcorn ceilings.

No other ceilings have popcorn except for that ceiling.

So we had to scrape her ceiling.

And then we ended up painting everywhere.

So besides taking down the wall, we repainted the kitchen and repainted our master, our primary bedroom.

We repainted the kids room.

We touched it up a little bit.

And Madison's room we replaced.

We painted three walls.

Yeah, we.

We.

Jen.

Jen got out here and like, did a.

A.

A fair amount we had some help from our.

Some from our friends.

So thank you to.

To all of them who.

Who helped us when we were painting and moving in and we were moving chandeliers around because we got a friend who used to be electrician for, you know, a nuke electrician.

So he was great.

So.

And it was like we.

I used historic paint colors, so I used paint colors that were inspired by colonial Williamsburg.

Yeah.

So the kitchen is Yorktown gray and that.

The Yorktown Revolutionary War.

The Battle of Yorktown.

And then our downstairs bathroom, our half bath was like the last thing, even though I ripped off the wallpaper right away, which they don't really show it on the.

On the show.

It was like this bright red berries.

Yeah.

Wallpaper.

I couldn't stand it.

It was like maybe feel the psychedelic.

So I ripped that off the wall first thing.

And we lived with bare walls in there for 10 months until I painted it.

Yeah.

And I finally painted it again, a Yorktown color, Washington blue.

But then I hung wallpaper of the mural of Washington crossing.

So.

So you're.

When you're.

When you're sitting down, you're sitting there basically in the boat with Washington on the Washington crossing.

I mean, it's.

It's a huge mural.

You know, it's like 6ft by 6ft tall.

Yeah, I think it's 6ft tall by 10ft by 10ft.

So it wraps around, you know, 2/3 of the room.

So very much a historian's downstairs half bath.

And if, you know, Hamilton, we have a sign in there that says in the room where it happens.

So it's kind of funny with the bathroom, but just know that when.

If you want.

When you watch the show, there was a beautiful brown desk where we had taken out the wall.

We were able to save that desk.

And we repurposed it.

We repurposed it.

We gave the bottom half to our son, who wanted a desk so bad, and he got his first desk.

And then we flipped the hutch part and we're using it as a bar.

Yeah.

Because it's so sturdy and well made.

So we've been able to kind of repurpose things in the house, but it's just taken a lot to.

To recarpet an entire house, to paint a lot of this house, to take out a wall.

It just.

It's the kind of work that it's just on the cusp of what you can do if you want to put in the sweat equity.

But with three kids and jobs and doing this, it's like it's taken us some time to kind of get there, but this house feels so great.

Like for our first time, the kids have their own rooms.

Yeah.

And then we have this podcast studio.

So this podcast studio, just so you know, Right.

If you're watching this, this was kind of like a media room.

They actually, I still haven't taken it out, but they had like an overhead projector and like a whole little AV space if you could.

If you can't see it.

But back behind over here, if we zoomed out, you'd be able to see it.

And so now this is our dedicated podcast space.

And it's been so nice for us because if you ever started with us early on, we would set up and break down on our living room dining room table in Norfolk for three years.

And we did that every other night.

Every other night.

Once a week, sometimes twice a week, setting it all up, breaking it all down, storing it away.

And we did that for three years.

And so now we finally have a podcast studio.

We're finally able to kind of make it smooth enough so we can make these videos for you and make these, you know, just so much easier for us, production wise and really kind of step up our game.

Yeah.

And I will say filming for House Hunters was kind of a dream come true.

Like, we actually made it.

We're buying a house.

You know, We've been married 17 years.

We're buying a house.

The kids are getting their own rooms.

We're filming an episode of House Hunters.

We're talking about the history of Memphis.

And for us, it just felt so good to kind of do that and to be able to share that with all of you.

It was exciting, it was fun.

We learned a lot and we made some friends along the way and.

And the kids had a great time.

So the whole experience was just fantastic.

Yeah.

So if you're watching this or if you're listening to this, like, shoot us an email or.

Or drop us a comment in, you know, for the video version.

If you have questions about, you know, our experience, we'll kind of pass along what we're allowed to pass along.

And, you know, thank you so much for all your.

Your support, our listener support, our watcher support over the years.

And we're excited to kind of move into this next phase with the podcast studio doing more video and kind of just really kind of, you know, pushing the.

The Talk with History brand forward and the podcast forward.

Yeah.

So if you're interested in history and on location history and stuff, you can listen, listen to with your kids.

In the car.

You know, subscribe to Talk with History.

It's a great way to listen to where you're visiting before you get there and give you advice of what to see, where to park and what to eat.

Yeah.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

This has been a Walk with History production.

Talk with History is created and hosted by me, Scott Benny.

Episode researched by Jennifer Benny.

Check out the show notes for links and references mentioned in this episode.

Talk with History is supported, supported by our fans@thehistoryroadtrip.com our eternal thanks go out to those providing funding to help keep us going.

Thank you to Doug McLiberty, Larry Myers, Patrick Benny, and Gale Cooper.