For Its 40th Birthday, ‘This Old House’ Revisits Its Birthplace

Forty is not old for a house, but it’s an unheard-of age for a television show. All the same, This Old House has been a public television staple for four decades. To mark the anniversary, carpenter Norm Abram, plumber Richard Trethewey and host Kevin O’Connor visited the house that served for show’s first project, a mansard-roofed Victorian in Dorchester, Massachusetts.

“Norm looked at a skylight in the kitchen that he installed 40 years ago,” O’Conner says. “There are no leaks – the skylight still functions beautifully. So does the heating system installed all those years ago. The house looks darn good. Other than different paint colors and a new kitchen, it looks the same.”

In 1979, when This Old House began as a local show broadcast by WGBH in Boston, the genre of renovation programming did not exist. There was no HGTV, no “Property Brothers,” no “Fixer Upper” power couple Chip and Joanna Gaines, and the idea of flipping a house was not yet a thing. This Old House, produced by the same station that brought Julia Child to a national audience, began as an earnest, step-by-step renovation of an aging house that caught on with its audience; after one year, the show went national. Today it is the number one-rated home improvement series and has won 18 Emmy Awards.

It has never changed its format. While houses get torn apart, rebuilt and decorated with dizzying speed on other home improvement programs, This Old House takes its time, focusing on a few specific aspects of a project during each episode. Viewers are treated to the drama of driving nails, the fine points of plumbing and up close images of grout. Sealing ductwork becomes a high point in a show that does for home improvement what Julia Child did for cooking. Just as we were mesmerized watching her sauté onions, so are we fascinated when Tom Silva talks about flashing. Who knew that watching carpentry and masonry could be so much fun?

The fortieth season will see the renovation of a mid-century split-level house in Brookline, Massachusetts.

“The original house will be preserved, and the additions and renovations will make it look much more mid-century modern,” says O’Conner. “It will scream mid-century modern, whereas before, it only whispered it.”  

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