@PopularMechanics _ May 2019 812009
Vila begins
working on the
restoration of
Ernest Heming-
way’s former
home in Cuba.1989
Vila leaves This
Old House.
1990
Bob Vila’s Home
Againpremieres.1992
Vila appears on
Home Improve-
mentin an
episode titled
“What About
Bob?”1996
The short-lived
magazine, Bob
Vila’s Ameri-
can Home, hits
newsstands.2000
BobVila.com
launches.for me to start. Probably the place. But
that was the ’70s and the ’80s. I was young.
I worked hard. I got lucky, I got some help,
and I used what I had,” he says, hands out,
flannel sleeves folded up to his elbows. “In
this business you learn the camera’s your
friend or it’s not.”
For his part, Vila says, there is no bad
blood. “I’m grateful,” he says. “But I never
talk to those guys.”
D
ID VILA TAKE some secret away
from the format of This Old House
to make his mark in the years that
followed? While he believes he’s developed
since then, he knows there was some luck.
“Having produced the Home Again shows
for so many years, having hosted This Old
House for ten, and interviewing so many
regular people, you start to recognize the
ones who are going to be good interviews
and the ones that are going to be difficult.
You deal with it.”
People are quick to give Vila credit for
being the first reality-TV show host, just as
they often cite This Old House as the first
true reality show. Vila doesn’t much want
that credit; at least, he merely shrugs upon
hearing it. “Back then, we came out of the
background of educational TV. That was
the work of it. Teaching.” He smirks a lit-
tle at the thought of today’s construction
shows. “The programming today comes
from the tradition of Queen for a Day. You
know, they take this family that’s living in
a squalid situation, send them on a cruise,
and when the family comes back, bingo,
they’ve got a palace.”
Here Eric Thorkilsen concurs with Vila:
“This Old House has always devoted as many
as t went y-si x episodes to cover a single proj-
ect, providing far greater information on the
process and techniques involved.”
Put the question to Vila, and he’ll tell you
he was never a general contractor. He was
never trying to convince anyone of that. “I
did the hiring on my projects,” he says. And
he was never a tradesman. “I did the work
I could at the start, like any young guy. But
I learned to listen to the guys who worked
for me on my projects.” He took some of that
trust into the creation of the show.
“Mostly, I was the developer on Home
Again, that’s what I knew how to do. It’s
what I’d done on my own restorations. I was
the guy who put together the money deal,
put together the purchase, put together
the contractors, pulled in the architect. I
brought people together.”
“Bob was a teacher,” Tim Allen says.
“He still is. When I remodeled my house
in Michigan, I wanted to have him in for
a look at what I was building. I just wanted
to impress him, you know? Like a favor-
ite teacher from high school. I mean, he’s
Bob Vila, right? And he signed his name
in some wet concrete in the garage some-
where. I just wanted his name on my house,
somewhere. You know, a ‘Bob Vila was here’
kind of thing. The guy really was every-
where then.”U
NDER THE DOME of a large con-
struction tent on the roof of the
Hispanic museum, a welder and
framing carpenter listen to the voice pour-
ing from the platform above them. The
sonorous narration
echoes downward,
weirdly familiar to
them both. Voice: en-
gaged and certain,
coaxing somehow.
They tilt their heads
and squint, each of
them working to place
the speaker, who’s
describing, or explain-
ing the work being
done here, which in-
cludes the removal and
replacement of the
building’s original flat
roof, which is a cen-
tury old now, which
has leaked for years, into the attic space,
the gallery space.
The voice: inquisitive and curious, but
oddly authoritative. This is their job, but
he gets it.
“There was originally a skylight here.
And at some point, it was just covered from
above and forgotten. So they’re working
to figure out, at least in this next phase ofthe renovation, whether to replace it with
something more akin to solar tubes, which
are a great product for allowing natural
light into a space.”
The two men busy themselves but stay in
earshot. They want to see this g uy, whoever
it is. The welder coils a hose. The carpenter
gathers spilled carriage bolts in his gloved
hand. They listen, and cipher their past,
the practice in the way he speaks, the eager-
ness for detail.
It’ll come to them.
“And now they have to figure out how to
deal with damage to the interior ceiling,
which is a challenge when they haven’t been
able to see what’s in this attic, behind this
plaster and lath, for over one hundred years.”
The speaker is not wrong about the job.
The guy knows some things. What is he?
A contractor? A professor? An architect?
And when this speaker steps onto the
platform above them into view, the welder
exclaims: “It’s him!”
A little guy, compact in his vest, locked in
on the story of this place. The welder grasps
for a name. It’s been a
while since he’s seen
this guy, the speaker,
who boot-clunks down
the ladder. Decades
maybe.
Meanwhile the car-
penter watches him
descend, takes in the
khakis, the f lannel
shirt, the down vest.
Suddenly, it adds up
for him. “I knew it,” he
says, “that’s him.”
The welder looks
at his friend like he’s
crazy. “What’s the
name?”
The carpenter nods toward the man
working his way down the rungs. Bob Vila.
But the names escapes them.
“I think he’s been here before,” the car-
penter says.
Bob Vila waves to them from the ladder.
They wave back, then close in for a hand-
sha ke. They want to hear what Bob Vila has
to say about the work at hand.“Bob was a teacher.
When I remodeled
my house in
Michigan, I wanted
to have him in for a
look. I just wanted
to impress him,
you know?”
—Tim Allen