MIDDLETOWN - “I’ve got some eye candy to show you,” Dave Chastanet tells Norm Abram, master carpenter of the long-time TV remodeling favorite This Old House.
Chastanet, vice president of marketing and sales for New England Woodworking, escorts Abram around the shop floor, crowded with wood and machinery, to show him a huge scalloped wooden shell that’s going to form part of a Newport doorway.
“All solid wood, mahogany,” says an admiring Abram.
But Abram wasn’t in Middletown just to check out some fine carpentry.
New England Woodworking was chosen to do most of the woodwork for the current This Old House project, a ‘50s modern home in Cambridge, Mass.
The Middletown company is crafting everything from the built-in oak shelves for the library to the treads for the central stairway, which are formed from slabs of reclaimed teak.
So Abram and the crew from This Old House came to New England Woodworking for what they call a “side trip,” to show its viewers where the woodwork comes from.
“Everybody likes to see where things are made,” said David Vos, who was directing the Middletown segment.
Abram and Chastanet didn’t work from scripts, but Vos has them repeat each scene over and over, “sculpting the conversation” as he goes.
Chastanet told Abram the company was doing a large wooden gate for a Newport property.
“Doing it? What kind of word is that? You’re not just doing it. What’s better? Fabricating it? Creating it? Building it?” Vos asked. They went with building it.
Later, Vos coaxed more emotion out of Chastanet.
“Be like a proud papa . . . brag! brag!” he said.
So Abram and Chastanet went back to the gate and tried again. How was it?
“I don’t love it. But I really, really liked it,” Vos said, and had them do the scene yet again.
As the two men admired the gate, Vos didn’t look at them. Instead, he watched the scene on a hand-held monitor, relaying instructions over his headset to cameraman Steve “Dino” D’Onofrio.
When it came time to check out the library shelves for the Cambridge house, Chastanet introduced Billy Nagle, the owner of New England Woodworking, to the cameras.
Nagle told Abram he’d rather be working with wood than dealing with the business side of a company. “My kind of guy,” Abram said.
Many of the company’s workers, temporarily idled because noisy machinery had to be shut off during the shoot, gathered around to watch the boss on camera.
It was Chastanet who got New England Woodworking involved with This Old House in the first place, sending the show a letter describing the company’s high standards.
“He was persistent,” said producer Deborah Hood. “Last year, our designer needed some bookcases, and I said, ‘I may have the guy for you.’ “
At first, Chastanet said, he didn’t tell Nagle he was contacting This Old House.
“Someone once said it’s easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission, and I guess that was my philosophy,” he said. “When I got here and I saw all the cool stuff we were doing I thought, ‘I can’t believe we’re not on This Old House.’ I had always been a big fan of the show.”
This Old House is the granddaddy of home renovation shows, on the air since 1979.
Originally produced by WGBH, This Old House was acquired by Time Warner in 2001. It is now produced by This Old House Productions Inc., in Concord, Mass.
Abram, 55, has been with the show since it started.
He was born in Woonsocket and grew up in Milford, Mass. Abram learned woodworking from his carpenter father, and studied mechanical engineering and business administration at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
He was “discovered” by Russell Morash, the creator of This Old House, who commissioned him to build a barn on Morash’s property in suburban Boston. Morash was so impressed with Abram’s work that he invited the carpenter to help with the renovation of a Victorian house in Dorchester, the first project for This Old House.
Since then, Abram has worked with three hosts - Bob Vila, Steve Thomas, and Kevin O’Connor - and became host of a spin-off, The New Yankee Workshop, which started in 1989.
He’s published eight books on carpentry, and become of a bit of celebrity, with appearances on Oprah! Today, Late Night with David Letterman and more. He even voiced himself on a cartoon, Freakazoid!, in an episode called Normadamus.
Abram lives in a colonial-style house with “an eclectic interior” that he built in the Boston area.
During a lunch break from shooting at New England Woodworkers, he talked about the enduring appeal of This Old House.
“Our homes are usually our biggest investment, and people have a tremendous amount of interest in them,” he said. “We want the place we live in to look good, to be comfortable.”
“The show appeals both to the hardcore do-it-yourself people who would do these projects themselves and people who wouldn’t do any of it, but the show still helps them communicate with their contractors.”
Abram said the homeowners on the show pay for the renovations. This Old House rarely talks numbers, he said, because costs can vary widely from region to region.
The show also has a life in reruns, he said, and budgets that made sense 20 years ago are not valid today.
And there’s another reason.
“A lot of this show is about the dream. People dream about how good they can make their house, and then they do the best they can with what they can afford. We do very high-end work, for the most part.”
This Old House is nearly building a brand new home for its current project, the ‘50s modernist house in Cambridge. A few distinctive elements are staying, at the request of the owner.
As the show’s title implies, a modern house is something new for This Old House.
“The producers wanted to do something different than anything we had done in the past. 1950 might not be considered old, but a lot of things have changed about houses since then,” Abram said.
He noted that the show can teach people something about architecture as well as the nittygritty of tearing down walls or installing plumbing.
“Say ‘modernism’ and people have an impression of something cold and hard. And it can be. But we’re trying to show it’s possible to have something that’s ‘warm modern.’ The show gives us a chance to educate people about the style.”
asmith@projo.com
