BOB VILA: Hammer Time

Emmy-winning home repair and renovation expert Bob Vila is a homeowner’s best friend.

Vila, former host of PBS’ popular home-repair series, “This Old House,” is heading into the second season of the syndicated series “Home Again With Bob Vila.”

“Home Again” focuses on construction techniques and practical information on building and renovating homes. During the first season, Vila constructed a Cape-style home in Massachusetts and remodeled an urban graystone in Chicago.

Vila, who also is the TV spokesperson for Sears, studied at the Boston Architectural Center. His restoration of a Victorian Italianate house in Massachusetts was honored as “Heritage House of 1978” by Better Homes and Gardens magazine and led to “This Old House.” Two years ago Vila left that series when PBS objected to his commercial endorsements.

During a recent visit to Los Angeles, Vila talked about “Home Again” with Susan King.

Is it true next season you will be visiting celebrities’ homes?

There’s a possibility. We are interested in looking at projects that are somewhat glamorous, but not looking at mansions. It’s possible we might be looking at a house being remodeled, that in Anytown, USA, would be a $150,000 house, but because it’s in Brentwood it’s $2.5 million.

The house I looked at (today) in Brentwood belongs to Mark Harmon and Pam Dawber. It’s won’t have to be torn down, but they have removed a large portion of it that was underbuilt or damaged or had to be redone. I know Beverly Hills is the place where tear-downs originated.

Has the concept of tear-downs spread across the country?

It took a few years, but the concept made it to Cape Cod. In one case a house that sold for $3 million was torn down and the house built on that location probably cost another $2 million.

The concept is all over Naples, Fla., where we have been working. There are a lot of examples of tear-downs because it’s a community that 20 years ago built a lot of nice little retirement homes. They are perfectly good masonry houses on one-acre lots, and they are now worth $2 million to $3 million because of their location on the waterfront of the Gulf of Mexico. The houses are inadequate for the profile of the buyers. The buyers are very interested in large, lavish rooms.

The area is under the Federal Environmental Management Act, which limits the amount of remodeling or adding one can do to an existing house. Clearly the thing to do is to demolish the existing house.

What is the remodeling project you’re working on in Florida for next season?

It’s a 1938 cottage: two bedrooms, one bath, a little living room, a little kitchen and a couple of porches.

The most ambitious thing we are doing is installing a swimming pool. The house itself is governed by FEMA and the regulation says you can only spend up to 50% of its assessed value and the assessed value of this house is $20,000. So we have a $10,000 budget.

The pool doesn’t come under the guidelines. Paint jobs don’t qualify, or any parts of the house which are condemned. The plumbing was condemned and the wiring was condemned on this house. We will probably spend $50,00.

What tips can you give homeowners who need to hire a contractor?

In most instances, people find contractors because they hear about them from other people who have had success with those contractors. If you go into a community and you don’t know anybody, then you should go directly to one of the organizations that contractors belong to and get some referrals, interview them, call their references and visit, if possible, job sites where they have done work.

Are more and more homeowners, though, doing repairs and remodeling jobs themselves?

Absolutely. Each year it keeps getting bigger. In terms of the actual amount of dollars spent on remodeling, it was something around $105 billion last year. I vaguely remember when it was $10 billion. There’s no doubt it continues to grow in terms of people’s interest in it, and in terms of a rather bad recession, people’s need to do the work themselves.

It seems older homes and apartments were better built than are residences today. Is this true?

No. It’s the same today as it was in the ‘30s or the turn-of-the-century.

The challenge today is to build with good quality, but with a lot of control so the cost is kept under control and that means minimizing waste. That means recycling materials and finding salvageable materials. In the little Florida house, we go to a salvage yard where we find five French doors that came out of the inventory of some lumber yard that went belly up, and we bought them at 50 bucks apiece. We also got two neat lavatories for our bathroom for $40 apiece.

There are lot of alternatives of which you have to be aware.

“Home Again With Bob Vila” airs Sundays at 7:30 a.m. on KCBS.