OT: This Old House homeowner's profession?

[Jim]

[Pat Barber]

When you consider that on one house that they did, one bathroom came in at $24,000, $360,000 don't sound too bad for an entire house.

The amounts of money that are spent on these houses is beyond anything most people can imagine.

Tom Silva and the boys must all be millionaires at this point.

John wrote:

[Leon]

Yes absolutely they have but not since they have changed formats and do more of the work themselves vs. the homeowner.

[Prometheus]

Well said- if everyone was a DIY sorta person, I'd have a real hard time paying the morgage. I'm really glad there are rich folks who want to pay someone else to play around with wood and mud.

[mjmwallace]

Heath:

Yeah the best I could find is that he's in biotech. Probably a doctor or head of a company. He showed up on a list of people contributing to fight MS. And that's about it.

I do know where the house is - Sparks St in Cambridge. HMM., wonder if Google Earth would show it.

I like what they did with the house. Frank LLoyd Wright is someone who I admire and revere. This house had some of his design elements.

As to all of the others naysaying about show- well

1 - It's a TV show 2 - They have a large budget because they get donated material. Also they have to show bathrooms/kitchens/garages/living rooms/dining rooms in every house otherwise you might not be interested in it. It' s not pitched to a DIY audience anymore. Hometime is. 3 - finally IT"S a TV show. Not reality.

I 've been a fan for close to 15 years and it always cracks me up when they pronounce a "gloom and doom" sentence on a house in the first show and then after a mere $500,000 it's a brand new house!

The house they profiled in Washington DC shows how a modest budget really works. I also noticed they did NONE of that work at all.

MJ Wallace

[RicodJour]

He could have inherited the money. Or won a lottery. Does it really matter?

R

[Edwin Pawlowski]

It goes beyond donated. A customer of ours sells insulated concrete forms. (we do some of the manufacturing for them). It would be a natural to donate the material needed to build a house and get publicity. In addition to the material, they wanted a donation of $18k to use them. Our customer declined.

[Lee Gordon]

It's not just TOH. One of my clients had a product featured on Bob Vila's show. They had to provide the materials and pay a fee to appear on the show and are entitled to use "As seen on Bob Vila's Home Again" (or just "Bob Vila," as the show is now known) in their advertising and promotions for only six months unless they want to pay another fee to renew.

Lee

[George]

Ah yes! "Product placement." Helps the movies turn a profit, too.

[John Santos]

I drove by the place this afternoon on my way home from Rockler. It doesn't look quite finished yet. Mostly landscaping undone.

I peeked into the back yard to see if it was flooded (we've had about 20" of rain in the last month.) It looked very green and wet (the part I could see from the street, but not flooded. (They spent a lot of time on the show and a lot of money worrying about drainage. I guess it worked.)

It appears to be one of the smaller and probably cheaper houses in the neighborhood. I would guess most of them are in the $1.5-$2 million range. (Maybe a lot more.) West Cambridge is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in one of the most expensive urban areas in the country.

I wonder if they'll ever again do a house a normal family can afford?

[Owen Lawrence]

Well if I watch these shows at all, it's to learn something. If I'm the kind of audience the producers are looking for, then why would they leave a major source of confusion in every show, namely, "How in the world could I perform the financial aspect of all these construction techniques?"

- Owen -

[John Emmons]

Although it sounds like a cliche, and it probably is, if you have to worry about how you'd afford to make some of the improvements that are shown on TOH, you can't afford to make them.

Their "target" audience are wealthy home owners who want to do a little remodel job that just happens to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They're not aiming the show at people who could actually do the work or who would have trouble paying someone else to do it for them.

I think Marie Antoinette said it best, "let them eat cake..." if we peasants can't afford TOH remodel jobs, let us watch "ask TOH" and maybe we can afford to fix a leaky faucet the way that the boys on the other show do...

I like the bits where they go to the various manufacturing facilities to show us how some of the really expensive stuff is made.

John E.

[Lee Gordon]

[Edwin Pawlowski]

Depends on where you live. Move my house about 35 miles and I can get $100k more for it. Move it to Boston and I can get $250k more for it and build two more like it on the same lot size I have now and get that much for each. .

[RicodJour]

So Cosmo's target audience is supermodels? That's all they ever show.

The audience is anyone interested in home improvement with the ability to buy tools and stuff for their house. The shows underwriters are the main concern. Home Depot probably sells millions of dollars of merchandise for every one super duper bathtub that's seen, and bought, from the show. Some of the other underwriters are Toro, Schlage, Lowe's, Andersen Windows - those don't seem so upscale to me.

R