They're just like you see on television. Designer Laurie Hickson-Smith, her gorgeous I Love Lucy locks cascading hither and yon, enters the room she's about to transform for the show Trading Spaces. One look and she utters a soft wailing, "Y'all, what am I going to do with this couch?" The piece of furniture that looked so white in photographs is white-with-dirt in person.

Meanwhile, the never-sit-still Vern Yip is in a house across the way, in the room he must magically redo in just 48 hours for $1,000. He pulls out a stack of crimson pillow casings, all ready for stuffing, and looks a bit sheepish. "I made them myself before I got here," admits Vern, who learned to sew for this show, one of his many arrive-prepared tactics. "There's a reason I only get 45 minutes to an hour of sleep at night."

Vern and Laurie are two of six designers who rotate episodes of the popular show, which airs daily on the cable network TLC. Like fellow designers Frank Bielec and Hilda Santo-Tomas and carpenter Ty Pennington, they are Southern. Sometimes their roots show up in the room designs. Always, those good Mama-taught manners come to the rescue in tense moments with stressed homeowners, who swap houses and revamp one another's rooms on camera.

Not that these homeowners are stressed. Laurie sets hers to work scrubbing the dirty couch, and Vern's couple begins to coat his room with grayish-purple paint. Neutral colors are big with Vern; traditional fabrics reign in Laurie's world. Their styles could not be farther apart.

"If it were up to me, everything would be white, and we would have a mix of antiques and modern," says Vern, who at age 8 custom designed the furniture for his bedroom in McLean, Virginia. "My sister said it looked like a bank vault--metal and gray," he remembers. "I'm a contemporary designer and a real minimalist. But that's not how the majority of people live, so I have to temper it with the reality of the situation. Sometimes people even want country," he says with a wince.