I Just Watched “Murder House Flip,” and It Fulfilled My True Crime-Meets-HGTV Expectations

After finishing Netflix’s “Tiger King,” I was in desperate need for a new unbelievable show to binge and keep me entertained. Well, the streaming service gods have heard my cries and delivered. Say hello to a home renovation show mixed with infamous murders (and no, Carol is not involved with any of them).

“Murder House Flip” launched today on Quibi, the new mobile-only streaming service that airs short episodes of 10 minutes or less. The unconventional series takes historic homes with a dark past and brings in a design team to help transform them for the current residents to live in peace. (True crime lovers, this one’s for you).

The first episode introduces Tom Williams and Barbara Holmes who purchased a historic Victorian home in Sacramento, California back in 2010. After a Google search, they discovered that this home once belonged to Sacramento’s most notorious serial killer: Dorothea Puente. (And yet, they still purchased the house?!)

“Dorothea Puente ran this as a bordering house. She took in people that had no families, she had them sign over their social security checks,” Williams and Holmes said. “After she poisoned them, she would put them in what is now our bedroom. She held onto them in there sometimes for a couple of weeks, and they could be decomposing there for however long it took for her to wait for an opportune time to take them downstairs and bury them.” 

Seven bodies in total were discovered in the front and side yard of the home and have since been removed. Even though over 30 years had passed since then, Williams and Holmes wanted to create new positive energy outdoors for their grandkids to play in—turning a once-graveyard into a child-friendly playground, if you will. And that’s where the “Murder House Flip” team came in.

Designers Mikel Welch and Joelle Uzyel stepped in to make the yard feel like a more, well, kid-friendly space. Over the next few days, the dynamic duo got to work: getting rid of clutter, rolling out turf, adding a gazebo, you name it. And of course, the kid-friendly component wouldn’t be complete without some sort of play area, so in a swing set went (built over where one of the bodies was found, might I add).

And this episode is just the beginning; from now through April 21, a new episode of “Murder House Flip” will be released every weekday, so you can get your HGTV-meets-true crime fix on an almost daily basis.