3 Tampa couples to battle for renovation supremacy on TV

At one point during a 72-hour bedroom renovation marathon, Tony LaColla says he and his partner Jose Garbosa were on the verge of hallucinating.

"We were under a lot of stress and had gone without much sleep," says LaColla. "And by 4 a.m. one morning, Jose thought I was talking to him when I wasn't making a sound."

LaColla and Garbosa are one of three couples who competed for a $10,000 prize on HGTV's new series "Battle on the Block."

They faced off against neighbors Steve and Loren Erickson and Jenna Becker and her fiancé Ryan Clements in making over their respective master bedrooms.

The three couples live in Ybor City townhouses.

The new series pits three families in a battle for design supremacy, $10,000, and the bragging rights as the "Battle on the Block "champions. The episode airs at 10 p.m. Saturday on HGTV.

"It was a win-win situation because you get $5,000 in cash and up to $10,000 in store credits to do the project," says Becker. "So we went for the moon and really got everything
we wanted."

She and Clements went with a yellow and purple color scheme.

LaColla, who is president of the Historic Ybor Neighborhood Civic Association, says they got involved with the show after answering a letter from producers who had been canvassing civic associations.

The competition took place in March. The three couples were given 72 hours to redo their bedrooms. LaColla says the show's host and designer, Genevieve Gorder, offered advice and each team had limited help from a contractor.

"But we had to do most of the work ourselves, from driving nails, to painting and cutting out spaces in the wall," he says. He says they hit some snags such as buying new doors that didn't fit. "And we had already tossed the original doors so Jose went dumpster diving to try to get them back."

Two of the major features in LaColla and Garbosa's bedroom are a $3,000 king-size bed and a wall mural - an 8-by-10-foot time lapse photograph of Seventh Avenue at night by photographer Brian Adams.

They also installed a widescreen TV in one wall. "The wiring for that was not easy," he says.

"This was great for us because we thought our bedroom was bland and now it's great," says Becker.

"At first we all wanted to redo our kitchens but the producers said they already had their quota of kitchen remodeling," LaColla says.

He adds that they were encouraged to be competitive, make catty remarks about their rivals and talk smack. "We had some funny encounters but we were all good sports about it," LaColla says.

The bedrooms were judged by a local panel of experts including an architect. The couples cannot reveal who won the $10,000 prize.

"We all got together afterward for a celebration dinner and we agreed that it didn't matter who won because we all got fabulous bedrooms," LaColla says. "Everybody who sees our room says it's amazing."