Considering how often Jasmine Roth and her family liked to visit Park City, it was inevitable they’d end up in Utah.
Roth, the HGTV star behind the renovation show “Help! I Wrecked My House,” got married on Park City Mountain in 2013. Two years later, her family bought a vacation home in old town Park City.
A love of snowboarding then brought them to Park City just about every weekend they could make it work during the winter season.
“We call it our happy place,” Roth recently told the Deseret News on a Zoom call. “And slowly but surely, we just started spending more and more time here, to the point where we were like, ‘Should we just move? Does it make sense? Can we really do this?’”
It was a no-brainer for Roth — but that didn’t make the move from Southern California easy.
In fact, the HGTV star said the transition was “1,000 times harder” than she expected it to be.
At the time of the big move — which involved uprooting her family, company and TV show while also designing their new home in Utah — she was pregnant with her second child. She had her daughter, Darla, last September, not long after relocating to Park City.
“Still kind of just unreal how big of a move this was for us,” Roth said. “Would it have been easier to move with a 6-month-old or a 1-year-old? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. But … once I make a decision, I’m off to the races. There’s no pausing me. It’s been a lot, but we love it here.”
Now in its fifth season, “Help! I Wrecked My House” made its official Utah debut Sept. 24 and continues with new episodes every Wednesday. As Roth filmed the new season, helping families rebuild their homes, she was also starting her own new chapter, rebuilding a career while navigating the expansion of her family.
Starting over
Roth gave birth to her daughter, Darla, a month early. She weighed 4 pounds and 8 ounces, and spent 15 days in the NICU before getting to go home with her family.
Although Roth has another daughter, Hazel, the four-year gap between her two girls made it feel like she was starting over again.
As she relearned the ins and outs of tending to a newborn, she started working to rebuild a team of contractors in Utah — she even received a recommendation from a nurse she met late in her pregnancy.
”It kind of felt like a startup to me,” Roth said. “It felt like we were just back to the first day I started my business in 2012.”
Even with this latest season under her belt, the team rebuilding continues to be a work in progress. She spends the bulk of her time networking, and it’s something she doesn’t take lightly.
“I’m only as good as my team,” she said.
Darla was 7 months old when Roth started filming the new season this past March — her official return to work post-maternity leave. The first episode shows Roth waving goodbye to her kids as she goes to meet her first clients in Utah. At one point during the episode, she calls a contractor to let him know she’s running late because she was pumping and spilled milk in her truck.
“It’s a juggling act, right?” she said. “Trying to figure out just how to have everything planned in advance, and how to manage our time, and how to make sure we’re not letting anybody down. Just doing my best.”
She described the 10-episode season as a “crash course” that had her handling a lot all at once.
But there was a silver lining, she said: Utah families were ready for her arrival.
‘We’re really trying to showcase Utah’
With “Help! I Wrecked My House” now in its fifth season, Roth’s reputation does precede her a bit. People are more comfortable with the show’s premise, and she doesn’t have to spend as much time selling them on it.
And she really didn’t have to spend any time convincing her Utah clients.
“I don’t know if they were waiting for me to bring my company and my show here, but it sure did feel that way,” she said. “Every season, I say the wrecks are a little bit bigger — and it’s true. The folks that called this season, I don’t really know where else they would have turned. The wrecks are substantial, and that was eye-opening for me, just how much somebody can actually wreck their house.”
To help her clients, Roth had to familiarize herself with the various conditions Utah homeowners face — issues far different from living in Southern California. For instance, in the entrance of her own Park City home, she has a boot dryer — something she never would’ve had in Huntington Beach.
Since Utah experiences all four seasons, homes are built differently than what she was accustomed to in California. The landscape changes the design and functionality of a house, she said, and she threw herself into learning all about basements and water drainage and snow melt.
As she highlights the families and homes she’s working with throughout the new season, Roth said the state’s landscape will also be on display.
We’re really trying to showcase Utah, show off the beauty here … and just why we moved here. And I think that’ll be really clear by the time the season is over.
— “Help! I Wrecked My House” star Jasmine Roth
“We’re really trying to showcase Utah, show off the beauty here … and just why we moved here,” she said. “And I think that’ll be really clear by the time the season is over.”
Roth encouraged Utahns to tune in throughout the season — “It might be somebody you know,” she said.
But the fact that she was able to uproot the show from Southern California and bring it to the Beehive State tells her the appeal of “Help! I Wrecked My House” extends well beyond wherever it’s filmed.
“All of us have found ourselves in that position where we’ve taken on something that’s bigger than we expected, or we found ourselves in a scenario that we have no clue how we got there,” she said. “And so while these are extreme examples, I do think that the show is all of us.”