I was attending Drew University for Historic Preservation. The school was contacted by The Home & Garden Network (HGTV) about doing a show on historic restoration. The person the producer spoke with knew me and that I was currently restoring a home and gave them my name.
They contacted me and I sent them a box full of photos of my house. They also contacted the town to get information about Freehold, NJ and its history.
They were very interested in filming my restoration work on the house. They had big plans. Since Bruce Springstein grew up two blocks away they even wanted to get him involved.
Most of the work I did on my house was cosmetic. My main project was stripping all the paint off the woodwork. I had just completed this – 3 years of work. This was a huge project but there was still more to do.
The newly stained wood looked great but these plain white walls did not fit the image. I was just starting to look at wallpapers.
I tried to stall them until the wallpaper was up but they needed to move for they did not know when their money would run out to do this show.
Well time did pass – not much time, but the show was scaled down drastically and all they planned to do was changed. The result was just a filming of photographs lasting about 2 minutes.
Happy to get even a small peek into what you have done with your own property. Thank you for sharing!
It’s elementary. Restore, do NOT ignore, original character and natural beauty! Thanks for informing, explaining and SHOWING folks HOW to do it. Monitarily and morally, it makes no sense, to destroy, the integrity of historical structures. They’re ART, in it’s greatest form. Thanks for caring & sharing!!
It’s so refreshing to see a program that presents restoration as an option. There are too many shows that make the sledgehammer route seem like the only logical thing to do.
I feel that working with what is there instead of removing original material is better even if you don’t plan on doing a restoration.