Ty Pennington Opens up About Working With HGTV Personalities Alison Victoria and Sabrina Soto in ‘Ty Breaker’ (Exclusive)

Ty Pennington is taking on a whole new challenge with HGTV‘s Ty Breaker, which premieres on Jan. 11 at 9 p.m. ET. In the series, Pennington competes with HGTV stars such as Windy City Rehab‘s Alison Victoria, The High Low Project‘s Sabrina Soto, and One of a Kind‘s Grace Mitchell as they attempt to help families either renovate their current property or move to a new, customized one that better suits exactly what they want. During an exclusive interview with PopCulture.com, Pennington opened up about working alongside each of these talented women in his new HGTV series.

With Ty Breaker, you can expect a ton of banter — and even some fireworks — as Pennington engages in a friendly competition with each of his HGTV co-hosts. While the craftsman is tasked with convincing families to stay put in their current homes, which they will then renovate to suit their needs, his co-hosts all try to convince the individuals to move to an alternate home that can be designed to fulfill their every desire. Even though Pennington may have shared some differences in opinion with his co-stars during the course of filming, he still enjoyed working alongside them and learning a little bit about how they operate within the home renovation space.

“The only person that I’d worked with before was Sabrina Soto, and I knew that she was a firecracker,” Pennington explained exclusively to PopCulture.com. “Well, I mean, that’s one of the reasons I requested to work with her is because I knew she would not just say okay to everything I said. It would be like, ‘No, that’s a horrible idea.’ And so I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s what I’m looking for.’” He continued to say that he had never worked with either Victoria or Mitchell before, so he wasn’t entirely sure what to expect with them. But, after working with them on Ty Breaker, Pennington only had kind things to say about the HGTV personalities.

“When I met Grace, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ The warmest, sweetest, human being, but also super-competitive because she grew up with all these brothers,” the carpenter shared. “But at this point, she’s really the only out of my co-stars that’s raising three kids and understands what it’s like to have a big family, which comes in really handy in some of these episodes because I wouldn’t be able to tell you what that’s like. What’s fun is she’s got a really great sense of humor, and so it was literally like being a family again.” When it came to Victoria, Pennington soon learned that the Windy City Rehab star is not afraid to speak her mind.

“And then Alison, oh my God. She is… Talk about a firecracker. She’s like an M-80,” he added. “I actually went to Chicago to meet with her before any of this even took part and just talking with her, I was like, ‘Oh my God. This woman could run a nation. What is going on?’ So I was just like I loved how unfiltered her responses were to anything and I was like, ‘Okay, I like this.’ That’s the way she is every day and it’s the way she is on TV and that’s what I look for, it’s just that authenticity.” You can catch Pennington working alongside Soto, Mitchell, and Victoria on Ty Breaker, which airs on Mondays on HGTV at 9 p.m. ET.