In fall 2003, Katherine heard that Ron Hazelton, the former home improvements editor on Good Morning America, had moved his new show, House Calls, to Fairfield County, Conn. House Calls is similar to This Old House, except the projects are much smaller and can be completed in a few hours. Katherine went to his web site and filled out his form asking for a house call. The very next day she got a call from one of the assistant producers, who visited our home to see firsthand what the suggested project entailed. A short time later, we got word that the show was on.
Ron arrives with a crew of 12: two professional carpenters, an audio guy, two cameramen, and assorted producers and assistants. They took over our house for two 12-hour days. About half the work was done by the professional carpenters, who put in the longest hours (more than 12), but a good deal was done by Katherine with direction from Ron. I was working from home both days and so my appearances were cameos. It should be remembered that Ron is a master carpenter and he was a carpenter long before he was a TV show star. He is a font of knowledge about woodworking and such.
All the materials are donated by vendors as “paid placement”. There’s a reason the label always faces the camera whenever a product appears on the show. Ditto for the GMC truck, which gets at least two cameos in every show (again, logo front and center).
Unless you happen to have the DivX codec installed, you'll need to download the free DivX player to view these. Here’s the segment with the commercials edited out:
This video was first captured by my ReplayTV, then moved to my PC with DVArchive, processed with Revue to remove the commercials and sync the audio and video, and finally processed by Dr. DiVX, which squeezed the original 2GB file down 110MB. This video is copyrighted by Ron Hazelton and is used with his explicit permission.
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