Hacker Cinema
This Old House
1979 · TV series · documentary · 30 min episodes · 48 seasons
Created by Russell Morash
TV's original home-improvement show, following one whole-house renovation over several episodes.
3 positive1 negative9 neutralfrom 13 commenters
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14 comments on Hacker News
When we bought our first home, a townhouse, in the early 1990s the builder only sold to people that were going to live in said home. They helped save the down payment and made sure that utility payments (gas/electric) were under a certain amount each month (super insulated and heated with a hybrid hot water system). Bigelow Homes, they were on a few This Old House episodes in the 80s.
It would be nice to see that again, the new housing market is ridiculous now.
Binging old episodes of This Old House will give you about the same level of understanding that a football fan has of his favorite sport. You won’t necessarily be able to fix things but you’ll know something isn’t right.
Episodes of This Old House.
By chance I've been consolidating meta-data on old DIY, Craft, et el. TV series and This Old House Season 11 E15 (Concord Barn, 1989) featured an in depth walk through of just such a specialised custom stair case shop that's still very active.
They design and shop build production run and custom stairs, dismantle, ship, and fit or oversee fitting on site.
Seems like a good business: Over 50 Years of Custom Staircase Design and Construction
https://arcways.com/
When I was a kid, finding water damage on This Old House projects would increase the budget by 50%. The owners always looked like they wanted to puke during the wrap up episode.
There are a few larger houses left with character in my town. Left, because starting in the 60's people left the city for the suburbs, and the houses fell into disrepair, burned down, etc.
I thought about buying one. Twice as big of a house that I have now, for half the price. However, you have a boiler system, no central AC, basically non-existant insulation, more wallpaper than you would ever want to remove, ancient electrical systems, and 125 years of shadetree repairs to every part of the house.
You'd spend a quarter million dollars upgrading the house to today's standards, like you see on an episode of This Old House. And then what? You have to deal with the crime and nuisances of the city, alley or a horse stall to park in, you get to pay city income tax, city water and trash which are 3X what I pay in my township, and then you have to figure out where you're going to send your kids to school. The city public schools are bottom 5% in the state so you have to go private or drive them to another district.
On that note, channels like AvE and Real Engineering come from two different ends of the spectrum in terms of production quality but have a similar feel in terms of how much I learn per minute of content.
There are also channels like the Sampson Boat Company that take a project that would've just ended up turning an old boat into scrap after a while into one of my favorite carpentry/woodworking things to watch, better even than old episodes of the Woodwright's shop or This Old House.
Also a warning to people watching "This Old House":
The seasoned, professional, competent tradespeople you see on every episode are a nonexistent myth in most areas of the country. Many of the projects they accomplish with relative ease are not practical to the more junior tradespeople you will be able to find, and they will be fantastically expensive if you find the veterans you see on the show.
Two Apple TV apps I have recently discovered and love using:
Pluto.tv: replicate the cable guide experience. Endless episodes of things like This Old House, MST3k, and vintage game shows. I much prefer Pluto content to modern HGTV-type cable shows, and it scratches the same itch of "just watch whatever's on".
- https://pluto.tv/
Kanopy: use your library card or university ID to stream indie movies and documentaries. Free kids programming. Lots of PBS.
- https://www.kanopy.com/ - https://www.kanopy.com/kids
As an aspiring woodworker and handyman, I just want to suggest This Old House Insider [1]
The subscription gives you access to the entire This Old House and Ask This Old House library. They're in the process of adding all New Yankee Workshop episodes as well as PDF plans of those projects (normally $14.99 each). It's become my Sunday morning go-to now.
1) https://www.thisoldhouse.com/introducing-this-old-house-insider
The most recent episodes of the current season are also available on PBS Passport which you can get for a $5 monthly donation to your local station.
Edit: It's something like $95.60/year. I've been getting it as a gift so didn't realize how bad the signup form was. Also, they don't have any app/roku support yet so I cast the video from Chrome.
This Old House is great for people interested in DIY or just knowing more about how houses should be built and renovated. Having done a fair amount of that myself, the HGTV shows can be very misleading. There's no sense of the scale of a project when everything finishes within the duration of a one-hour episode and the HGTV budget numbers are completely opaque and questionably realistic. I sometimes wonder if they're including any promotional discounts they receive in those budget numbers since some of them are far below what it would cost me to do a project even in a lost CoL area of the country.
This Old House visited a converted lighthouse in Season 36 Episode 7. They went over all the things you need to do to convert it to a livable space. Long story short, it's expensive and requires a lot of work.
Sadly it doesn't look like that episode is easily accessible.
https://www.thisoldhouse.com/watch/old-house-tv?season=36&project=8253
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYJxhkv4Pl8
We don't use ads for the D programming language. What we do, and I've done in the past, is write articles about programming that are interesting in their own right, and that happen to use D:
http://digitalmars.com/articles/
Pretty much all programming products, even free ones, operate this way. Much of the content you see on Hacker News, and on reddit/r/programming, is of this form.
There are TV shows that do the same thing, such as "Detroit Muscle". Each show is about how to do a repair/customization job on a car, and various tools and products are used to do it (and the makers of those tools and products pay for the show).
Tupperware parties are another example of this sort of thing.
It's like having a free cooking class where you show people how to cook with butter, and you're in the butter business.
The hit TV show "This Old House" was all paid for by the products and tools used in the show. It didn't look like advertising, but that's exactly what it was. And it works, and people love the show (I loved it, too).
I.e. organic marketing.
The latest house on This Old House [1] is being built in the same way as the Sears houses were from a company called Connor Homes [2]. They even talk about the Sears homes in the first episode.
1. http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/tv/house-project/overview/0,,20994500,00.html 2. http://connorbuilding.com