Jasmine Roth Shares How She Made The Video That Ultimately Landed Her on HGTV
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Help! I Wrecked My House star Jasmine Roth's TV career didn't just happen overnight. The California-based designer and new mom recently detailed her journey to HGTV on her blog JasmineRoth.com and there's a lot to takeaway. Spoiler alert: the Instagram hashtags you use on your posts, and splurging to have a professional camera crew film you can go a long way.
Roth's story began in 2010 after she and her partner, Brett, purchased land in Huntington Beach, California. Despite having no experience in building, they planned to build their dream home, as well as a second house next door as an investment to offset the cost. To get the ball rolling, they enlisted a team of builders to work on the houses they had drawn out; however, the situation was not ideal.
"Our builder started asking a lot of questions that we couldn’t answer and since we were both working full-time in other jobs, being home developers on the weekend was starting to wear on us," she wrote. This encouraged Roth to make a big change in her life — leave her corporate job in social responsibility and work on the homes full-time. "I really enjoyed going to the jobsite everyday," she explained.
In 2013, their dream home was done, and Roth had even started her own home development company, Built Custom Homes. Of course, the company's first big sale was the house next door! However, she continued to keep building custom homes for clients and buying land—ultimately growing her portfolio.
In 2015, Roth took on a fun build in Park City, Utah, and documented the whole building process through her Instagram account. "The videos were raw, real, and showed the progress as it was happening. In retrospect, I’d accidentally put myself on a TV timeline without even realizing it," she wrote.
After wrapping on that project, she started working on a beach home back in California. She used the hashtag #beachbuild when posting about this project — which led a production company working with HGTV to stumble upon her posts. The company reached out via email and explained that HGTV wanted to do a show about building homes at the beach.
"That first call was surreal. I’d never considered being on TV and knew nothing about it. I asked how they’d found me and was so surprised when they said… Instagram," she wrote, revealing "I had less than 1,500 followers at the time, although I was posting away like I had a million," she shared.
Unfortunately, that show didn't pan out, as another candidate had sent their footage to the network before her. However, she was still encouraged to send cell phone footage to the production company in order to make a sizzle reel for HGTV.
However, Roth was dedicated to putting her best foot forward and didn't think iPhone video would cut it. "Without even thinking twice, I offered to pay out of my own pocket to have a video crew come and film all my Built Custom Homes projects," she wrote. She hired a local husband and wife video team to film her every move on-site for two, 12-hour shoot days. "I climbed on the roof to look down a chimney, I installed flooring, I even had them video me coming out of the porta potty! This was REAL LIFE and I didn’t want to miss a thing," she explained.
Her splurge for the camera crew paid off. A few months after sending the footage in, the production company informed her that HGTV wanted to do a paid sizzle reel. This meant that the network would now fly out some crew members to film her working for a few days.
Having a professional video team come out to film her taught her a lot. She recalled that the experience taught her how to be "camera aware" and not turn her back to them while rolling. She also learned not to talk over others as interruptions don't work on TV audio. Her biggest takeaway? "I learned that a little goodbye kiss to your husband was VERY AWKWARD when the cameras were rolling," she wrote.
In July of 2016, Roth's efforts finally paid off. "HGTV wanted me to film a pilot episode of my own show. ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?!?!" she wrote. Fast forward to October of that year, when filming for her first show Hidden Potential started. Then in April 2017, it premiered on HGTV. The show ran for two seasons before Roth headlined her newest series: Help! I Wrecked My House. She's also starred on (and won!) the network's competition series Rock the Block.
Interested in following in her footsteps? You can read her full blog post here and here (there are two parts!). You can also check out her tips for landing your house on HGTV.
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