Did you hear the one about the Lake Forest family who got their dream kitchen rehab done at half price and in just three months?
There is no punch line.
It actually happened to Heidi and Mike Smith, who have gone from a cramped galley to a top-of-the-line showplace in less time than many people take to choose backsplash tile.
Their secret? Perhaps the fact that their Christmas card this year featured Norm Abram and Steve Thomas offers a clue.
So does the age of their home, a handsome but modest (by Lake Forest standards) brick Tudor built in 1928.
Tuning in to NBC’s “Today” show Thursday morning or WTTW-Ch. 11 at night (8 p.m.) will solve the mystery.
The Smiths avoided the ordinary renovation quicksand thanks to PBS mainstay “This Old House,” the dean and still the class of home-renovation shows whose series of programs on their kitchen makeover begins Thursday.
Heidi Smith, 36, who works part time in an interior design firm, said she considers her family’s “TOH” experience to be “like winning the lottery,” even though this particular lottery ticket will likely end up costing them $80,000 to $90,000.
Also featured in several project updates on “Today,” their new kitchen is loaded with high-end freebies, from appliances to the under-floor heating system, and almost better than that, she said, has been the level of expertise the show has brought to what was originally a more modest project.
“It’s so much more than I ever imagined,” Heidi said. “This has just been a dream.”
“Trading Spaces” gets most of the press given to rehab TV these days, and two entire cable networks, HGTV and its sibling DIY, have gone hard after the “TOH” audience by focusing on similar themes.
“People in general are very curious about how other people live,” said Thomas. “And renovating a kitchen or a whole house is the scariest project most people will ever undertake. They’re spending more money than they’ve ever spent, faster than they’ve ever spent it. They need people to help them with the process.”
But even with all the competition, when it comes to doing nitty-gritty renovation featuring people who are better with a block plane than a microphone, “This Old House” remains unmatched. Last year’s 23rd season averaged 4.2 million viewers a week on PBS, while HGTV carries “TOH” reruns, renamed “This Old House Classics,” every day of the week.
At the same time, the 24-season lifespan of “This Old House” has coincided with, perhaps even fueled, a rise in American home preservation.
“The presence of so many programs goes to prove how important homes are in this country,” Abram said. “I see other programs where I know the person doing it is not a professional. On `This Old House,’ first and foremost, everyone is a craftsman.”
“It is considered to be a nuts and bolts show, and I think people respect it more,” said Kris Boyaris, whose firm, Lake Forest Landmark Development, designed and built the Smiths’ kitchen.
Landmark’s usual projects carry a budget in the $1.2 to $1.8 million range, and before now, their cheapest was $500,000, or about $140,000 less than the Smiths paid for their entire home in November of 2001.
Yet Boyaris — again, the power of television and the “This Old House” name — was among the 20 or so people moving in and out of the house on a recent Tuesday, as the sixth of eight episodes on the Smith odyssey was being taped.
She talked with her project manager, Jim Eimerman, about closing up a gap between the farmhouse-style sink and countertop, and she suggested an extra layer of decoration on the molding that was to go atop the painted white, custom-made maple cabinets.
“You might want to come here and look at this,” Eimerman said at one point, showing off the new sink’s perfect installation. “Scary good. Center of the window, center of the sink, center of the cabinet.”
On the other end of the kitchen, series executive producer Russ Morash and senior producer Bruce Irving rehearsed a scene with hosts Norm and Steve, one that ended, at least in rehearsal, with the show’s trademark, “Let’s take a look.”
When a visitor asked about how often this phrase is used as a scene transition, Irving said, “That’s mean.”
Then he added, “That’s part of the `This Old House’ drinking game. You drink when we say, `Let’s take a look.'”
In the garage, as Norm and Steve prepared to actually perform the scene, there was a problem. Thomas was supposed to walk through the opening garage door to talk with Abram about getting the cabinets made so quickly, and delivered on what was Super Bowl Sunday. But the automatic mechanism had stopped working.
“It’s clicking, but it’s not engaging,” said Abram, one of half a dozen people who immediately brought more high-level expertise than any malfunctioning garage door had ever seen before.
“Sears, Roebuck,” somebody said, looking at the manufacturer’s name.
“Is that right?” asked Irving. “That’ll explain that.”
It was Sears, readers may remember, whose commercial zeal helped bring about the departure of original “This Old House” host Bob Vila. Vila left the show some 14 years ago, in part because he signed a contract to promote Sears products.
Thomas, a home rehabber himself who had hosted a PBS documentary on primitive maritime navigation, stepped in alongside Abram to act as the viewers’ representative, or “mountain guide,” in his phrase, on these complicated projects.
Since then, Vila has gone on to host his own TV shows, while “This Old House” has only grown, adding in 1995 a well-done magazine of the same title that now has a 900,000 circulation. And this season, the series expanded to a weekly hour, the first half covering the current project, the second half a homeowners’ Q&A called “Ask This Old House.”
The reluctant garage door is eventually propped up and the scene can proceed, but not before Morash points Norm to a wooden door awaiting installation and tells him to “be adjusting that door, will you? I need for you to be doing something. God knows what you’re doing, but . . . “
Grabbing an autograph
Later, in the home’s temporary kitchen — the one in the sunroom that her three kids did not quite understand was not mommy’s dream kitchen — Heidi Smith asked Abram to autograph a hammer for a neighbor, a do-it-yourselfer.
Then she explained what led to her role as a solicitor of famous house guests.
The family moved to the house from Florida after her husband changed jobs, she said, and they knew they had to do something about the tiny kitchen and the sore-thumb greenhouse stuck on the front.
They began planning a rehab, but nonetheless, Heidi said, “It was so depressing to me to cook in my kitchen that I was out looking at other houses.”
Meanwhile, she heard from her mother that “This Old House” and the “Today” show were partnering up to hold a Dream Kitchen contest.
The Smiths had to send in a video, essay, photos and drawings explaining their need and their dream, but Mike, 37, a business operations director with Motorola, scoffed at the idea.
“My husband laughed and laughed. He said, `Heidi, we don’t have a chance,'” she recalled.
She resorted to the time-honored marital technique of bribery, letting him go on a sailing outing if he would just take part in the video.
More important to the eventual victory, the couple’s adorable triplets, 5-year-old Belle, Kate and Michael, were featured, and the video also showed the family’s normal casual dining arrangement, with the triplets seated around the kitchen’s cafe table and Michael eating on the floor.
Next thing they knew, Bruce Irving was at the house interviewing them, making sure they’d be a good choice as one of the six finalists (out of more than 1,000 entries) to be presented to “Today” viewers in November. It was the first time in at least a decade that “This Old House” had done a room-specific project (although the Smiths’ would expand to include some work down a hallway), and the first time ever the show had not chosen the project directly.
Some 35,000 online votes later, and the Smiths were clear winners (also the show’s first from the Chicago area) on their way to having done in 12 weeks what Landmark Development’s Boyaris says would normally take two months to plan and another six to build.
Laying out a little more
The initial budget to gut and reconfigure the old kitchen, replace the old greenhouse with an all-season room and relocate a powder room was $70,000, with what the couple described as some room for growth.
“Of course they dug deeper,” Irving said. “Never will they have the opportunity to do it this well, this quickly and this inexpensively.”
Now, with all the work almost done, it looks like it’s coming in somewhere around $90,000, Boyaris said. “But this is not a real number. The project is worth double that,” or, probably, more, she said.
“Everyone has gone out and talked to everyone they know to try to get people to donate to the project in various ways. A lot of people have given us discounts,” she said.
As an example, she said, “The painter’s original number was $8,975. And he is going to be charging $2,850.”
And even a partial list of flat-out donations is staggering: all the kitchen appliances, the cabinetry, the sandstone countertops, the plumbing fixtures, the flooring, the lighting, even some asbestos abatement and the exterior-wall insulation.
The value, of course, to these companies and contractors is a little television exposure (although the show is careful not to be commercial) and, more important, listings in the magazine and on the Web site and the ability to tell future clients they worked a “TOH” project.
But even if the cost estimates the show provides are nothing the viewer should use to plan his own project, Boyaris came away with renewed respect for the program.
“They tried very hard not to [stage] what they were filming,” she said. “They did try to film what was going on.”
She was most impressed, she said, by Abram showing up to, himself, lead the shaping and detailing of the Douglas fir beams that would support the new room.
“He totally is the real deal,” she said. “I was so impressed. We thought he was going to do one and take off. But he stayed and he’s a real worker.”
Don’t think the Smith family is not appreciative. Heidi Smith this weekend started transferring pots, pans and canned goods from her temporary kitchen to her permanent one, preparing for Thursday’s wrap party that will feature Frontera Grill chef Rick Bayless and be part of a final “Today” segment and the final episode taping.
She was, she admitted, in a kind of nirvana that kept her from selecting a favorite feature, an emotional state almost as feverish as the one that had her actually crying during the delivery of the new cabinets.
“It exceeded my expectations so much it’s hard to define one thing,” she said. “In general, it’s the layout — it’s so perfect in size — and the sophistication.”
But perhaps the single most relevant feature in the new kitchen and adjoining eating area is the new TV, a 32-inch top-of-the-line plasma model and a powerful symbol in this kitchen that television built.
It was, of course, donated, and it will, of course, be used to watch “This Old House.”
