Imagine yourself living in a 5,000-plus-square-foot lake home with a great room boasting a 30-foot-tall limestone fireplace; a wave pool and spa; a separate dock house with its own kitchen, living area and bedroom; and views from windows, porches, balconies and a "crow's nest" that go on forever.
That home is this year's HGTV Dream Home, and this million-dollar baby on Lake Tyler, Texas, a two-hour drive east of Fort Worth, will be given away to a winner in March.
This is the ninth year for HGTV's Dream Home giveaway, and the first time the home has been in Texas.
The 2005 Dream Home, designed by a Houston architect, is almost twice as big as previous giveaway homes - Texas-size, HGTV would say - and the prize package, which includes a 2005 GMC Envoy Denali and $250,000 from Lendingtree.com, is the biggest yet at $1.5 million.
The house comes fully furnished, including a table for 10 created from an old Mexican door (doorknob still attached) and an abundance of sofas - leather ones in the great room, love seats in the sunroom, a sectional in the media room.
It's not just the big things that are supplied. The kitchen features top-of-the-line appliances, including a freezerless Sub-Zero refrigerator in the kitchen and a Sub-Zero freezer in the pantry, but it's also stocked with dishes and glassware. So is the lakeside dock house.
There are piles of towels in the bathrooms, scented candles scattered on ledges, a complete set of Lemony Snicket books for the amusement of the young ones in the bunkhouse (children's bedroom), three vacuum cleaners and even six bottles of wood-floor cleaner in the utility room.
All you need to do, should you win, is pack your clothes, your toothbrush - and your checkbook.
Your checkbook? Yes, your checkbook is very important. Fame and fortune don't come without a price, in this case, quite a hefty one.
Winning a Dream Home, you see, has some taxing problems associated with it.
Just ask the previous eight winners.
The Tulsa, Okla., teacher who won the first dream home, a three-story log home built with wood imported from Finland in picturesque Jackson Hole, Wyo., sold her prize for $668,000 shortly after learning she owed the IRS $250,000, according to Scripps Howard News Service.
Milton O'Bryant, a Midland, Texas, policeman, knew taxes would be a problem as soon as he learned in 2002 that he was the winner of the modern Chesapeake Bay waterfront home in Talbot County on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
"When we first saw it, we thought, `Well, maybe.' We kind of toyed with the idea of packing up and moving there," says O'Bryant, who supervises the front desk for the Midland Police Department.
In the end, O'Bryant and his wife decided it was simpler just to sell the house.
And it likely will be the same for this year's winner, despite the infusion of cash as part of this year's prize package.
The total income tax bill for this year's prize package will be around $525,000, which means, even with the $250,000 in cold cash from mortgage lender Lendingtree.com, the winner will need to come up with about $275,000 to keep the IRS at bay.
And that's just the start.
Should the winner move in, he or she would be spared the expense of mortgage payments, but there'd still be the continuing matter of property taxes for a million-dollar home. Property taxes will likely fall between $20,000 and $30,000 a year, the builder estimates.
Moving constrains
And, of course, there's the utilities for a 5,400-square-foot home. Plus, the winner and the winner's family will have given up their jobs to move to Tyler - all of which means, for most people, moving into the Dream Home just won't work.
Lori Wallace, HGTV vice president of ad sales marketing, says winning the Dream Home is still a dream come true, no matter what happens with the house.
"There are various reasons why people don't keep them. It's sometimes challenging for a person to pick up and move their entire life. Whether they keep the home or sell it, they have the ability to create their own dream home."
O'Bryant would agree.
He sold the Maryland house for about $1.3 million, and paid taxes of about $450,000. Selling the house was easy: "We had people lined up," he says.
And he expects to be building his own dream home in about four years, when he retires.
"We did purchase a hilltop, right down in the middle of Hill Country. ... We will be building a dream house. It's a no-lose situation," he said.
`Undiscovered treasure'
To the folks at HGTV, the word "dream" means more than just "big," more than just "expensive."
"We have quite a number of criteria we look at," said Wallace, the HGTV executive. "The main one is editorial value. We air a one-hour special during the sweepstakes period. The special has to portray the dream home not only as a dreamy-looking home, but the area has to have a dreamy look as well.
"We look to find an area that's somewhat undiscovered, so that, in presenting the dream home, we're revealing this undiscovered treasure."
In other words, Santa Fe, N.M., and Aspen, Colo., need not apply. Instead, HGTV has gone to places like Camden, Maine; Nehalem, Ore.; and Beaufort, S.C., putting those cities on the map.
The process of creating the home, from scouting locations through construction to final decorating touches, takes about a year and a half, Wallace said.
In the case of the Tyler home, it began with builder Mark Mahaffey submitting an application for his upscale development, the Reserve at Lake Tyler, as the site for a dream home. Architect Antonio Flamenco then submitted a hurry-up design for a home.
HGTV liked the idea of a Texas site - Tyler certainly fit their "undiscovered" criterion, and the combination of a lake and East Texas pines met the requirement for beauty.
HGTV expects 40 million entries in this year's contest, which began Jan. 1 and closes Feb. 17. Details are available on HGTV's Web site, www.hgtv.com.
