Ashton Kutcher makes his mother cry -- with a surprise home remodel

Ashton Kutcher used his baby daughter as an excuse to lure his mom out of her house for a month, so he could remodel her basement for a Mother's Day gift.

May 6, 2015 5:36 PM PT

Get ready to feel inadequate about the flowers you have on order for Mother’s Day: Ashton Kutcher’s gift to his mom this year was a surprise remodel of the big basement of her Iowa house.

The actor and stepdad Mark Portwood pulled off the construction surprise -- which took about a month to complete -- with a baby-related ruse. Seems Diane had flown to SoCal to visit her son, his fiancee Mila Kunis and their newborn daughter, Wyatt, and then she was talked into staying and helping out for a while.

“Go away for a vacation and you come back and your house is totally different,” said mom Diane Portwood, who burst into tears when the guys lured her downstairs moments after she towed her suitcase through the front door.

“For Ashton and Mark to pull this off and to not include me, I don’t know how they did it,” she said later.

What had been a guys’ dungeon, complete with seven recliners and a deer head mounted on the wall, was transformed into a cozy, contemporary-rustic space with big windows, built-in bunk beds for the grandkids, a fireplace and special areas to display Mom’s antiques and homemade canned salsa.

“My mom isn’t a girly-girl by any means, but I think we can pull back on some of the dude overtones,” Kutcher had said as he embarked on the remodel. The actor said he and his stepdad built the place when he was just 13, and described the house he grew up in as “the place that I call home, and that I’ll always call home.”

The remodel was a bit of a publicity-generating gift to himself as well, given that he did it with help from online home-design company Houzz.com, which counts him as an investor. The 27-day process was documented in a series of videos that can be seen on its website.

And Portwood was taken care of as well. Most of his John Wayne memorabilia collection made the final cut, and the redesign included an important feature: a recliner for him to use -- only this time it was a classy one, with a “hers” recliner to match.

See the final product -- and mama Diane’s overwhelmed, emotional reaction to it -- in the fourth and final video documenting the project. Note: You’ll have to cough up an email address or log in via Facebook to unlock the footage.

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