Admit it. If you’re thinking of redecorating a room or redesigning your home, you were probably influenced by something you saw on TV.

It’s hard not to be. These days, every flip through the channels reveals show after show in which homes are being knocked down, built up, painted, accented, or refurbished. From the humble Design on a Dime to the over-the-top Extreme Make_over Home Edition, home decorating shows are everywhere on television. Our appetite for these programs — judging by the number of shows and their ratings — is insatiable.

The attraction is clear. There’s something inherently satisfying in seeing spaces go from ho-hum or downright nasty to clean and beautiful in the space of an hour or less. And there’s always the implication that, yes! you too could have all this!

But how real are these reality shows? Is your dream home really just a gallon of paint and a few throw rugs away? Can you really turn your child’s room into a tropical rain forest in just two hours? Is a team of fervent volunteers led by a hunky carpenter going to descend on you one morning to turn your house into a Sears-furnished mini-mansion?

"They make it seem so easy. A little too easy," says Amy Stuchen, a local interior designer and co-owner of Dry Heat Trading Company. She doesn’t watch any of the shows regularly, but admits that "they’re a lot of fun."

Stuchen, whose store was once featured on Home & Garden Television, finds that her clients are given a boost in confidence by watching home decorating shows. "They watch those shows and they say, ‘Yes! We can do it too!’" Which is not a bad thing, she emphasizes, but she says that eight out of 10 clients ask her for help after they tried something on their own and hated it.

Larry Hayden, another local designer, is straightforward in his assessment: "They are so bad. They’re selling a bill of goods." A Berkeley-educated landscape architect, Hayden is sensitive to the use of color in interior design and believes in putting clients’ needs ahead of designers’ ideas. He thinks the home decorating shows fail on both counts, and detects little theory behind the choices the shows’ designers make.

Barbara Schaefer, of Schaefer Design Group, is more forgiving. "They’re talented people," she says of the shows’ designers, but agrees that the shows feed the "misconception that design work is really easy and it’s Poof!, like Bewitched!"

Like most television, interior design shows are, more than anything else, driven by production schedules and the need to tell a compelling story with dramatic visuals —classic design principles and client consideration getting all but lost in the shuffle. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be useful. Even Hayden admits that the shows "stimulate your thinking, and whether they’re right or wrong really doesn’t make any difference."

And viewers aren’t simply passive recipients of design wisdom from accepted channels. Schaefer says her clients look at everything they see on TV and get just as many decorating ideas from Desperate Housewives as from Trading Space.

Stuchen thinks people can get a lot from shows that give practical advice on how to do certain projects. "They show a lot of techniques that most people would never have known. They break it down for you," she says. Ultimately, if her client is happy, she’s happy. "It’s really not about me, the decorator," she says. Even if she personally doesn’t like what a TV-inspired client has done, "if they like it, and they got it from a program, then that’s awesome."

John Cafiero is a freelance writer in Tucson.