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Paige Davis took a trip down memory lane to revisit the beginning of her Trading Spaces journey.
Davis famously hosted the TLC and Discovery Home renovation series, which debuted back in 2000. Davis took over for the show’s original host, Alex McLeod, for Season 2 in 2001, and remained in the role until the show’s end in 2008. Davis returned alongside several original cast members for TLC’s Trading Spaces reboot, which aired for two seasons from 2018 to 2019.
Davis currently hosts the Revealed: Trading Stories with Paige and Butz podcast with former Trading Spaces production coordinator and producer Cyndi Butz. During the podcast’s latest episode, released on July 11, Davis shared her original audition video for the series.
Davis recalled arriving late to the audition to find the crew beginning to pack things up. One of the show’s executives, however, allowed Davis to still go through with her audition tape. “Hello, everybody. I’m Mindy, and welcome to Trading Spaces. If you don’t know already, this is the show that lets neighbors switch houses for 48 hours and redecorate a room in each other’s homes,” a young Davis says into the camera in the clip, pretending to introduce an episode. “Now, here we are in sunny Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the next two days will be filled with expectation, anticipation, possible pandemonium, but definitely a lot of hard work.”
Davis noted that part of her audition was scripted and part of it had to be improvised, including her on-screen interactions with Ty Pennington as he pretended to refurbish a fireplace mantel. (Pennington served as carpenter on the series from 2000 to 2003 and returned for the 2018 reboot.)
“We had good chemistry. We rode the train back together, actually. I was the last one that day to audition, so he was heading back to New York, the same as I was, and we happened to be on the same train,” she recalled. “And he said to me, like, ‘You booked it.’ I was like, ‘I didn’t book it.’ But I was happy that I’d done a good job because it was very difficult to get the audition in the first place. I didn’t have television on my resume, and they were looking for someone who was seasoned, at least to some degree, to helm a series.”
During the podcast, Davis also explained why she changed her name professionally once she booked the show. The host, whose full name is Mindy Paige Davis, said a TLC executive asked her to go by Paige instead, as the name sounded like it had more “authority” than Mindy.
Fans reacted to Davis’s audition stories via social media. “This was a GREAT episode and very educational,” one user commented underneath an Instagram clip from the podcast on July 10. Another fan wrote under a July 15 Instagram clip, “Paige and Buttz, I’m loving the show.” Referring to Davis’ comments about her and Pennington’s dynamic, someone else stated, “I love both of you!! Great talents and personalities!!”
Penning also hopped in the post’s comments, poking fun at how Butz joked that they “trained him to work with women” on the show. “Currently still in training!” the HGTV star quipped.
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