Television crews, long a fixture on the Strip, are making their way to Sunrise and Whitney

On the set of the DIY Network television show "Kitchen Crashers," host Alison Victoria was getting a heavy dose of reality.

Victoria and Sunrise-area homeowner Mike Lopez were halfway into the process of covering an unattractive door with sheet music when they realized it wasn't working. The glue they were using was loosening the paint from the door and clumps of paper and paint were sloughing off.

"We should have stripped the door first," Victoria said.

"Well," Lopez said sheepishly. "I painted it last night."

The pair regrouped and realized that the glue could be used to strip the fresh paint from the door. In a short time they had the door back to the primer and were applying fresh music sheets to it . With only three days to completely remodel a kitchen, there isn't any time to stew about mistakes .

Las Vegas was one of the first cities to be involved in reality TV when it was featured in several episodes of the long-running Fox program "COPS."

Several programs are based here, and many others, such as "Kitchen Crashers," come here to film major sequences.

Victoria was born in Chicago but has lived in southwest Las Vegas for 11 years. She went into interior design after graduating from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She now lives part-time here and part-time in Chicago. The show is filmed in both cities.

"The two cities have totally different types of kitchens," said "Kitchen Crashers" producer Rachel Sobel. "In Chicago (Victoria) deals a lot with small spaces and figuring out how to give people everything they want in a galley kitchen. In Las Vegas, there's more space and more options. You get to do more out-of-the-box ideas."

Victoria got into reality TV when she received an email seeking designers for the show "House Crashers." She said she worked as a behind-the-scenes designer but was asked by the producers to appear on camera in an episode. When the ratings proved to be unusually high on that episode she was offered her own show, which is currently filming its second season. Victoria believes the popularity of her show owes something to the housing crisis.

"With the way the market is now, everyone is staying put and putting money back into their homes," she said. "The kitchen is usually the most expensive part and complicated because everything has to fit and work."

Lopez and his wife, Sarah Thiele, are musicians. Thiele makes her living as a performer, which inspired the sheet music integrated into the design. They became involved in the show when they received an email from the producers jokingly saying that they had heard that the couple owned the world's oldest microwave.

The microwave was old. But it was one of the newer items in the kitchen when the couple moved in. The kitchen sported bright yellow laminate counters and brown laminate cabinets. The wallpaper was wagon trail-themed. The kitchen was not only carpeted, but the carpet had a plank and wood grain, designed to look like a pioneer floor.

"Mike called it 'wood-flavored carpeting,' " Thiele said.

The couple removed the carpeting and wallpaper, changed the lighting, replaced the counter with poured concrete and painted the cabinets black.

"We did the best we could with the kitchen with the budget we had." Thiele said, "which, as new homeowners, was zero."

By the time "Kitchen Crashers" showed up several years later, the kitchen also had a mysterious water leak, a mismatched stovetop from Craigslist that was too small for the hole it was in and black paint peeling from the cabinets.

"I don't think we had the worst kitchen, but we put a lot of time and effort into the rest of the house, and the kitchen never matched," Thiele said. "We could never get it to look clean."

Sobel said they often find their subjects at Lowe's home-improvment stores, either by announcing they'll be there or just by looking around the store for likely candidates.

"Basically the only qualification is you have to have a crappy kitchen," Sobel said.

Thiele was surprised how real the work on the show was.

"I thought they were going to fake like we were working on it and then kick us out while they did the work," she said. "This is a lot more hands-on than I expected, which is great, because Mike and I love hands-on. Last night I was on my knees for two hours scraping the floor, but it's worth it."

"Kitchen Crashers" airs on the DIY Channel at 9:30 p.m. Mondays. Lopez and Thiele's episode is expected to air in the summer.

A shot at fame

A chart on the wall of The Gun Store, 2900 E. Tropicana Ave., shows business growing at a phenomenal rate. Owner Bob Irwin, while not denying that it takes hard work to be successful, credits much of his success to being in the right place at the right time. He attributes his store's inclusion in a wide array of television programs to the same thing.

"It started out with interviews about gun stuff at the store," Irwin said. "We teach gun safety classes here and established ourselves as experts on the subject."

These days, whenever guns are in the news , one TV crew or another will come in for an interview. Irwin estimates that he's interviewed on camera about once a week. When the news of Trayvon Martin's shooting in Florida broke, Irwin was interviewed by three of the four network channels' local news programs.

"There's a lot of foreign press and TV that comes here, too," Irwin said. "They do pieces on the things you can do in Las Vegas that isn't gambling."

Visitors from other countries make up a large part of the crowd that fills the firing range at The Gun Store, where nearly anyone can try his skill with guns ranging from pistols to fully-automatic machine guns.

"A lot of them come from places where you couldn't even dream of doing that," Irwin said.

Irwin said the interviews led to movies and TV dramas and reality TV.

"We've probably been on a hundred TV shows by now," he said. "Pieces from several movies have been filmed here."

The shop has made numerous appearances on the History Channel's hit show "Pawn Stars," with guns brought in for identification or test-firing on the indoor range . The shop was also featured in "Auction Hunters."

"They asked us if they could bring guns here if they found them," Irwin said. "They didn't, but they found a lot of AR-15 magazines. So we brought them out to the range and used them. Machine guns make for a flashy ending."

The store's next venture into television may stem from its new shotgun weddings.

"We're doing weddings now," Irwin said. "People can get married with a gun in their hand. Two of our employees went through the work, so they're licensed to perform weddings. We've been approached by a few people who are interested in making it a show or using it in a show."

The website shotgunweddings.com touts the new service by encouraging visitors to "Pull The Trigger at The Gun Store! Celebrate your wedding with a bang, literally!"

For more information, visit thegunstorelasvegas.com or call 454-1110.

Contact Sunrise/Whitney View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 380-4532.