Question: "This Old House" The Current Project

features renovation of a modern house in Cambridge MA, and, it must be costing $$$MILLIONS! The house features all kinds of labor-intensive details.

Who pays for this? The program, which is partly funded by our donations? Or the home owner?

Reply to
Jack
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Not sure if your donation money makes it into the project - kind of doubtful. There's advertising and the show promotes products, materials and contractors - plenty of bucks in that. The project is in Cambridge, MA and in a great section. The house hadn't had anything done to it in quite some time. I'm not sure how long the owner has lived there, but I gathered it had been a while, so there must have been a fair amount of equity in the property. I don't know what the owner does, but he went to MIT, and we all know they're loaded. Right, Jeff? ;)

R
Reply to
RicodJour

A way long time ago, I think on one of their projects they stated the costs and the break down.

The home owners have to put up a certain amount (for that project it was about $50,000) and there were some things donated to them but they had to claim them (the value of them) on their taxes. The show didn't put any money into the project, it only rounded up the small handful of 'donations' from the companies they featured their products for. For example, instead of paying $10,000 for radiant floor heating, the home owner's cost would be around $4,000 with a $6,000 figure being 'donated'.

If the home owners would have renovated without TOH, it would have cost about $100,000.

Jack wrote:

Reply to
Dave

thats how it works, plus the fun of being on tv...

Reply to
hallerb

thats how it works, plus the fun of being on tv...

Reply to
hallerb

thats how it works, plus the fun of being on tv...

Reply to
hallerb

Theres a huge set of payments from any manufacturer who's product gets mentioned on the show that go to Rus Morash and his merry minions. Not only ius any manufacturer giving away a miniscule amount of product, they are playing a huge "placement fee" to the producers.

Not sure if any of that "placement fee" money goes into any hmeowner project, but it does pay the "talaent", such as it is, on the how -- i.e. "Rich" the plumbing guy, "Tom" the contractor guy; "Norm" th whatever guy, "Roger" the landscape guy, and the "host".

Morash has made a HUGE amount of money with the franchise, and only a small percentage of that has filtered back to WGBH and less to PBS as a whole.

Reply to
Jim McLaughlin

Reply to
Sir Topham Hatt

This current house project is another example why TOH is out of touch with its viewer base. How many of us could afford the stuff that is going on in this project? And the people who can, don't give a shit...

BTW The episode where they visted the high end gourme-=cheese shop was a total waste of 15 mins of my precious life.

snipped-for-privacy@home.net (Jack) wrote:

Reply to
Sir Topham Hatt

My buddies relative was in one of the older projects before everything became gazillion dollar projects. He blew his budget because the featured stuff that is placed by the manufacturers is all high end. So he had to scale up other stuff to match.

Reply to
George

Also he must be a very rich guy. They installed radiant heating under an outdoor walkway so that he wouldn't have to shovel it in the winter. How much is THAT going to increase his heating cost in the winter?

Reply to
Mikey

Reply to
Mikey

I have the same proble with all of the renovation shows on HGTV, etc. My wife loves to watch them, and I've got to admin that they're kind of interesting, but watching a couple of hours of this stuff makes me feel like an utter failure.

After all, if you can't afford a $20,000 bathroom and a $50,000 kitchen, you're life has obviously been wasted!

Reply to
Ian Pilcher

or no longer bother to watch the show!!

Reply to
Gazoo

The program producers get some products free (donated) or at a discount (so their products will be shown on TV), the owner has a budget and pays a lot of the cost.

TOH has often emphasized very large, expensive projects - remember when they rebuilt Tommy's brother's house from the ground up? The new one was really big. Some of that cost came from the insurance money (the house burned down), but given the differences between old and new, I'd say the new one was at least twice the insurance. Or the Vermont barn they did - no expense spared, really - or the pianist's house - same story. I think for many of these, the "renovation" budget is in the hundreds of thousands.

N.

Reply to
Nancy1

There was an early one, back when Bob Vila was the host, where the renovated an old farmhouse for a young couple. The last few episodes, you didn't see the homeowners any more, and at the end Bob sort of casually mentioned that they'd planned to spend $100,000 and it had been closer to $200,000. It came out in the paper later that the homeowners were really steamed about the whole situation, 100 grand is fair amount of money now, 15 years ago it was a LOT of money.

After that, it seemed like they emphasized sticking to the budget more. I haven't watched the show in years, so I can't comment on how they do it these days.

Brian

Reply to
Default User

Brian is right on about the "stink" over one of Bob Villa's TOH projects (if not more than one)

BV & TOH was featured in a Wall Street Journal article YEARS AGO & may have been the beginning of the end for BV with TOH.

IMO BV was more concerned about self promotion than doing a good job for the "client".

cheers Bob

Reply to
BobK207

Probably no more than paying someone to shovel it. If you get a lot of snow, I 'll be the radiant driveway ends up cheap.

Reply to
yourname

Let's see...

Assume: a 20' x 50' driveway = 1000sq.ft. 6" snow = ~1" water (frozen) = 170cu.ft. ice 63 lbs/cu ft. = 1E4 lb 450 gm / lb. = 4.7E6 g Latent heat of freezing 80cal/g = 3.7E8 cal 1 cal = .004 BTU = 1.5E6 BTU 140k btu/gallon = 10.8 gallons of oil Unless I've screwed something up (likely) about eleven gallons of oil or about $30, assuming no heat is lost to the atmosphere (big assumption given 1000sq.ft. surface) and 100% efficient heat transfer.

Now where are you going to put 700ish gallons of water that's just ready to freeze again? ;-)

By contrast a snow blower uses about a pint of gasoline and piles the still frozen water neatly out of the way until spring. ;-))

Reply to
Keith Williams

Keith-

I agree witht the basics of your post as well as the conclusion (move & store snow in frozen form but I have always thought 12" of snow equaled 1" of water If so you cacls are somewhat off

Also the heated walks / drives I am familair with Mammoth Lakes, CA) are turned on when the snow starts so you're not dealing all the snow at once but as it comes down, So the melted water flow away via "normal drainage"

Bottom line is........... if melting snow was cost effective there would be more snow melting insallations & few snow blowers throwers. Last year we got 10ft in week, my fuel bill wsa high enough with a drive melter. :)

cheers Bob

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- Show quoted text -

Let's see...

Assume: a 20' x 50' driveway = 1000sq.ft. 6" snow = ~1" water (frozen) = 170cu.ft. ice 63 lbs/cu ft. = 1E4 lb 450 gm / lb. = 4.7E6 g Latent heat of freezing 80cal/g = 3.7E8 cal 1 cal = .004 BTU = 1.5E6 BTU 140k btu/gallon = 10.8 gallons of oil

Unless I've screwed something up (likely) about eleven gallons of oil or about $30, assuming no heat is lost to the atmosphere (big assumption given 1000sq.ft. surface) and 100% efficient heat transfer.

Now where are you going to put 700ish gallons of water that's just ready to freeze again? ;-)

By contrast a snow blower uses about a pint of gasoline and piles the still frozen water neatly out of the way until spring. ;-))

Reply to
BobK207

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