Brian McCourt on the front step of his mom Jennine McCourt’s home, along with his two furry friends, Honey and Bear. If you’re interested in some of Brian McCourt’s work, you can find it in the July 7 edition of House and Home Magazine which features the design he imparted on his favourite client’s home. (https://houseandhome.com/gallery/stylish-budget-reno-brian-mccourt). Tinkess Photo

MORRISBURG – As we watch our children grow, it is common to tell them things like “You can be what ever you want,” or “You can do anything you want,” understanding even as we speak the words, that while our hopes for them have no limits, the reality is that life often gets in the way of who we want to be and what we would love to do.

Sometimes, however, a person defies the odds and proves that yes, you can get there from here. Brian McCourt is one such person.

McCourt is a multi-talented person. One of seven children, he grew up in and around Morrisburg, Williamsburg and Cornwall. He is a classically trained singer, an interior decorator, and a contractor, but is perhaps best known as the host of “Backyard Builds,” which for seven seasons on HGTV entertained and educated people on how to turn their boring back yard into an oasis.

While the show was based in Toronto, McCourt still has strong ties to this area, not the least of which is his mother Jennine, who relocated to a new, smaller, more manageable home in Morrisburg after her husband passed away. It was during one of his visits with Jeninne that Brian McCourt courteously agreed to share some of the lessons he has learned on his journey. One thing he is clear about: It is a journey with twists and turns.

“I went to university for music, which is a far cry from renovations and design, but I was going to be a singer,” said McCourt. “I wanted to do some sort of singing or become a music teacher or, you know, perform in some way. But when I was in university, I started the program and I found it wasn’t a lot of singing, it was kind of boring and a lot of studying.

“So, I worked two other jobs and for some reason thought I could flip a condo,” he continues. “I always had this thought of flipping, so I gathered some investment from friends and did my first flip, not knowing what I was doing. I watched YouTube, figured out how to change a toilet, all that stuff.  That translated into more flips because it went well. I did a bunch of flips until I was about 25, then transferred into contracting.”

McCourt says he has always had a real love for design and enjoyed being a contractor, and somewhere along the way the right person noticed him and approached him with the idea of a television program developed around design and contracting and asked him to come in for an interview. It didn’t go well.

“I bombed it. I was terrible,” said McCourt. “I had so much anxiety, I couldn’t even say my name.” Fortunately, the interviewer saw something in Brian and asked him to come back the following day to answer the same questions, but this time he was to relax.  “So, I came back the next day, and that was terrible again, but a little less terrible. About six months later, they called me and said we have a show.”

It seems that McCourt was just what they were looking for, and when paired with cohost Sarah Keenleyside they developed a kind of chemistry that worked. Not that it didn’t take a lot of practice.  “We practised. because I wasn’t really ready for this show,” said McCourt.  “I was going in every day for a couple hours to do some camera training because I just had this massive anxiety in front of the camera.”

While it may seem like this opportunity just fell into his lap, it was really the culmination of a series of life experiences which prepared him when opportunity came knocking. He recalls that his dad was handy, and his mom was a workhorse who would finish the projects her husband started. The family also had spoken with a local interior designer (Marg Lee) and from listening to their conversations he found that he understood the language she was speaking and a seed was planted. “I was surrounded with the idea that you could make things beautiful on your own,” said McCourt, “and when I was 14, they had left for probably about 10 hours. And I was like, I’m going to surprise them and make over a room.  I painted the room. I like took things from different areas, which is risky business. They could be very mad that I did it, but they came home and they were so surprised that it looked good and they were so surprised at the quality of the paint job that they were like, okay, you can do the rest of the house!”

Marg Lee came over for a few consults, and it showed how influential it can be at the right time, for a young person to see a profession, and to decide he wanted to chase that profession.

McCourt says even now, he still feels a wave of performance anxiety when he steps in front of the camera, but it only lasts for about the first ten minutes and then he settles in.

“Sometimes you’re more comfortable, sometimes you’re less, but I would say like, for me to really feel comfortable on set, it was probably season three. Even now, if I film with a new crew, if I’m doing a promo for a brand or something, I’ll have a wave of anxiety. When it’s with new people, you don’t know what they’re looking for, but the confidence comes from, knowing myself and knowing that I know what I’m talking about.”

Trust is an important component of this, according to McCourt.  “I want to make sure that what I’m doing is honest and authentic, right? I don’t want to be doing things and pretending it’s something that it’s not and people try to do it.  I want to make sure that it works well before I tell people to go out and buy it. That’s important.

In that same vein of authenticity, McCourt is a designer and a contractor, not an actor playing a part. Future plans may involve more television work, but nothing is finalized at this point. Design is what takes up most of his time currently.

One thing that shines through both in his television work and his design work is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to make things beautiful. “My parents didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up,” said McCourt. “They had seven kids within nine years. My mom, you know, worked shift work and whatever she could to make ends meet. My dad was a teacher/principal. They did okay, but growing up, it was tight, so when they were renovating, every dollar counted. My dad was extremely resourceful; he made a lot of the furniture we had. If he heard someone was getting rid of an old piece of wood or barnboard or whatever, he would make something out of it and make incredible things. So sometimes you can use your imagination instead of your wallet.”

If he had it to do over, is there anything McCourt would do differently? “Hmm, that’s a hard one,” he said, considering the question. “I’m not much of a rear-view mirror kind of person. I’m not usually wanting to change things because even the bad things have led me to the good things, so that I don’t know that my brain just goes to the good things. I’ve also got a little bit of that Jennine McCourt positivity thing going on there.

“I don’t think I would change anything,” he finally adds. “I just feel like I’ve learned so many valuable lessons. I would like to do it again. You know what? I think when you start in a, like in a TV role, and you’re so bright-eyed and bushy tailed, you’ll kind of, like, do anything almost. You just want to impress, and you want to do well. I would say I would maybe connect to myself a little bit more in there. right up the top. I would have maybe been more connected to myself and how I felt rather than just kind of doing what everyone else wanted me to do. And that’s less about what you guys see on the show on the unfinished product and maybe more on like the inside stuff.”

McCourt says that what motivates him is changing the way people live and making them happy and helping them to love where they live. “When people come home and think, oh, this is annoying, and this is broken, and this isn’t functional, there is no room for this, this is so inefficient,” said McCourt. “And I get to solve that for them and change how they’re living every day. It feels really good. And I think at the bottom of everything, my motivation of everything that I do, is my company’s statement to love your home, we help homeowners love their home.

Any words of wisdom for a young person who hasn’t yet discovered the path they would like their life to follow? “Just find something that you want to do, right? I found something that I love. I didn’t know what that was going to be in high school. I was always trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and I was going to be a teacher, and I was going to go to music, and I was good at art so, I applied to an art school and got in. And I just kind of followed the music path because I felt that’s what I should do because my dad was really into music and I just felt like it was the right path. But I had this underlying passion for the real estate and renovation and design.

“Follow your passions,” he adds. “Make sure you like what you’re doing because you’re just going to work so much harder, and it’s not going to feel like work and it’s going to feel good.”

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