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Home improvement is like cooking: if we spent as much time doing it ourselves as watching others do it on TV, there would be no need for KFC or contractors. So why is it that you can't swing a hammer on cable TV nowadays without hitting, well, a hammer? In one of the homilies that end his Discovery Channel show, designer Christopher Lowell offers a hint. "I hope I've given you some great ideas," he says, "so the next time you have guests, they'll feel as if they've walked into a warm and loving environment."

You've gotta love that "as if." You see, what Lowell and his peers know is that our homes are built out of hope and anxiety. Are we warm? Are we loving? If not, can we fake it with a few houseplants? Our homes are where our personalities and imaginations are nakedly on display, and we continually suspect they are lacking. And judging by the number of hideous paneled rec rooms being redone on TLC, Discovery, HGTV, BBC America, DIY Network and beyond, we just may be right.

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It's this dramatic, emotional side of homemaking that today's home shows appeal to, more than the nuts-and-bolts of nuts and bolts. Sure, there are still hard-core shows for people who actually own power sanders. But these new shows — light on the how-to, heavy on the effervescent patter — are more like daytime-TV makeovers: if only someone with a discerning eye looked at you, they say, you could discover your true, unique beauty. (They're not about doing it yourself; they're about redoing yourself.)

So on TLC's megahit Trading Spaces (where pairs of friends fix up, or ruin, each other's homes), the drama is, Do your friends really know you? Could you live their lives better than they do? And Trading Spaces' success has inspired a raft of shows that are as much about love as about louvers. Take HGTV's Designing for the Sexes, where spouses gamely spar over home projects, Mars-and-Venus style; one husband wants angular stones for the new fireplace because they're more "manly" than curvy river rocks. On Discovery's Surprise by Design, people race against the clock to give their unsuspecting spouses a room or garden makeover (TLC's While You Were Out takes a similar tack). Supplemented with wedding videos and gushy when-we-first-met stories and ending with a climactic unveiling, it's like The Newlywed Game with nail guns: If you really loved me, you'd know I hated pastels!

Which raises the question, If home design can jeopardize a relationship, can it begin one too? Since Sept. 30, HGTV has been trying to find out on the blind-date home show Love by Design. (Notice that buzzword design again. Who does anything as declasse as "decorating" anymore?) One single visits a stranger's pad for a surprise home renovation and, just maybe, a little somethin'-somethin' afterward. A silly idea, sure, but what better way to preview your future than to see what your prospective mate, given the chance, would do to your piles of CD jewel boxes? The eyes may be the window to the soul. But so are the window treatments.

• James Poniewozik