Kings of the castle

The Paunis were yelling for the bus to move before the camera crews were ready for them. After the camera crews and production staff posed the Pauni family, another chorus of “Move that bus!” came from the family and, engine roaring, the bus finally moved.

With the first glimpse of their new home the Pauni family jumped in the air, hugged each other and the designers and crew, fell to the ground in shock and turned with raised hands to a cheering crowd.

A crowd of close to 2,000 gathered at the site of ‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’ for the reveal of the final home Sunday afternoon and they did not seem disappointed.

The day started with a restless crowd that broke into cheers at any provocation. When Ty Pennington and the other designers arrived on the scene, people began screaming “I love you, Ty!” or “Over here, Ed!” whenever they could.

Some people were unaffected by the activity around them as crew that had been there for the whole week milled at the scene, and one man sat by the crew’s trailers strumming a guitar.

As the bus honked and the engine turned on, the crowd began cheering and the Pauni family arrived in their limo.

The family piled out of the limo, jumping around the street and hugging each other.

Hyrum Pauni came over to the crew of the show and shook hands with several of them, saying, “Thank you everyone. Thanks for working hard you guys.”

After the family saw their new house, twice the size of most in the neighborhood and their previous home, the crew of ‘Extreme Makeover’ began the work of getting the footage they needed for the show of the family in front of the house and going through the new rooms.

Designer Tracy Hutson said the house has a modern, ethnic feel to it.

“My favorite part is always when the family comes home,” Hutson said. “We’ve all had so much fun here. I can’t say enough good things about Logan.”

On the street, the other staff began cleaning up the set and packing their trailers.

For many people this is the end to a lot of long hours during the past week.

Troy Oldham, a public relations lecturer in the journalism department, has helped coordinate most of the publicity for the TV show.

“We started with six students, figured out their strengths and gave them teams of six more students. They reached out and reached out to get thousands and thousands of volunteers we needed. It’s been quite remarkable,” Oldham said, noting different students had different projects, ranging from organizing the benefit concert, to creating the T-shirts that were sold, coordinating night production and working with media.

Another PR professor in charge of publicity, Les Roka, said it was not just students working long volunteer hours.

“So many different construction companies had to come together,” Roka said. “The fact that in this industry you saw this competitors come together is remarkable. We had close to 200 businesses working on this. This truly was a valley-wide effort.”