If He Had a Hammer

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 Cod-style home in Massachusetts and remodeled an urban graystone in Chicago.

Vila, who also is the TV spokesman 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 we’re 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 won’t have to be torn down, but they have removed a large portion of it that was under-built 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.

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.

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