Steve Thomas Interview with Greener Living Today

Steve Thomas is probably best known for his fourteen years as host of television’s most popular home improvement series, This Old House.
Over the course of his 14 years as host, Steve became known as the “ultimate home enthusiast” and helped catapult This Old House to the top of PBS’s list of most-watched ongoing series of all time.

After leaving This Old House, he signed on with Planet Green to host Renovation Nation, a show that focuses on answering questions that every homeowner in America has about going green.
He also consults on residential building and renovation for clients all over the United States.

Greener Living Today
How did you get your start in construction?

Steve Thomas
My dad used to renovate houses. He’d buy old fixer-uppers and spend weekends and evenings fixing them up. I grew up in This Old House. When I got out of college, another guy and I bought a house in Olympia, Washington, for $14,000, did a full-on renovation, and sold it for $30,000. That was in ’74, when you could still buy a house for 14,000 bucks.

Greener Living Today
How did you become involved in This Old House?

Steve Thomas
In the eighties, I sailed big boats all over the world. On one of those trips, I met my wife. She was from the Boston area, so we moved there and started buying, renovating, and selling houses.

Meanwhile, I did a project in Micronesia called The Last Navigator. [Learn more at stevethomashome.com.]  So I got interested in Micronesian navigation, an ancient navigation technique using stars, waves, and birds, and then decided to do a book project in Micronesia, starting with the traditional navigators. They still use ancient techniques there.

So I did a year of preliminary research, then went off to Satawal Island to study with a guy named Mau Piailug.  I spent 1983-84 down there. Came back, wrote the book. One day while I was renovating a house in Massachusetts, my publicist called and said, “They’re looking for someone new to do This Old House.” Me and 412 other guys applied for the job—and I got it.

That was the start of my fourteen years on This Old House. Then I went over to the History Channel and did a bunch of stuff for them. Then Discovery launched Planet Green almost three years ago, and they were looking for original programming. When we heard the head of the network was a big This Old House fan, we ran Renovation Nation by her and she loved it. That’s how it happened.

Greener Living Today
Can you describe how you got into the green aspect of building?

Steve Thomas
 “Green” is a relatively new term. Twenty years ago we called it Sustainable Building, and then, later, Low Impact or Zero Impact. Only in the past two or three years have we had the term Green Building, which encompasses what I like to call “The Five Bubbles.” In the seventies, when oil prices skyrocketed, people began building sustainable buildings. Super-insulated, solar-heated houses that didn’t require much energy to heat and cool. And then oil prices dropped and we went back to biz as usual, with houses that used massive amounts of energy, that were way too big, and way too dumb.  So that’s where we are now.

Energy has long been on people’s minds, especially in New England where home heating costs are high. We need to think of energy in terms of the difference between the energy that goes into and the energy that goes out of a house.

I think of Green Building as six bubbles, or rings:

1. Energy
2. Workmanship
3. Materials
4. Health
5. Design
6. Connectivity

Workmanship is critical. I had an old first-period Colonial in Boston, built in the 1700s and moved to the site in 1836.  I renovated it numerous times, and over the twenty-three years I owned it, came to believe I could penetrate the minds of the old guys who built it. They understood that there were ways to detail a building that ensured it would last a long time. And if you failed to detail—say, putting flashing around the windows—you paid for it. It mostly involved keeping water out of the building, or, once it was in the building, getting it out. It’s workmanship detail that determines whether the building will last hundreds of years or self-destruct in half a dozen.

Materials, another important ring, includes the energy embodied in the materials and the environmental cost of the materials, such as gathering, cutting, harvesting, transporting, and manufacturing. Another factor is durability. Obviously, if you build something that will last without a lot of maintenance, it’s going to have less environmental impact than a building that falls apart in twenty years.

Health is a huge concern. People are worried about toxicity. They wonder, what’s going to hurt me or my kids. Health ranges from indoor air quality insured by adequate amounts of fresh air, to issues dealing with off gassing from carpets, glues in materials, and paints. People need to know what products have low-VOC’s and won’t off gas.

Design. The trend is toward designing smaller buildings that can satisfy all our requirements. Ideally, it fits in with the neighborhood, you want to care for it for the next fifty years, and it doesn’t require a lot of maintenance. That all comes together in design.  And all the other rings also come together in design.

The sixth ring is connectivity. The closer your house is to transportation, entertainment, and shopping, the more connected it is—and the less impact you have on the environment. Other ways of achieving connectivity include situating a porch so that it’s shaded, or opening the windows instead of using air-conditioning. Both are good ways to connect with your neighbors.

All of those things combined represent what green building is about.

To see . . . go to: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/08/steve-thomas-host-of-renovation-nation-interview.php

Greener Living Today
How do you go about choosing the green projects for each episode of Renovation Nation?

Steve Thomas
We scout out locations, hone in on regions—say, the Bay Area. In the course of any one episode, we might mix in two or three locations, anywhere in the country. We consider a lot of projects.

Greener Living Today
How do you prepare for each episode?

Steve Thomas
Story producers, the guys who hang out with the home owners, pitch ideas to the producer. They go back and forth, consulting with the home owner and the contractor. We generally spend two days at each house. For the owner, it’s a fantasy come true: Maybe if I call Renovation Nation, Steve and company will drop in and help me with my project.

Greener Living Today
Does one project stand out?

Steve Thomas
The gutsiest one was the barn. To try to build a barn in less than two weeks on an island off Maine in late October was insanity. The logistics were formidable, but we pulled it off. I call it a Stealth Green Project because everything came from that area. The trees, growing 35 miles up river, were logged and transported to the island. The barn is elegant from a design standpoint, a fabrication standpoint. It’s a sophisticated building that looks like it’s been there for a hundred years.

There was another good project in Houston. A couple sold their house in the suburbs and built a smaller one in the city out of galvanized steel, complete with solar panels and water collection—an amazing project. They were generating enough power for the whole neighborhood. A high-priced project, but a cool project.

A guy in Portland, an architect, was living in a yurt in his backyard. He did it on the cheap—80 percent of the materials in his renovation were either purchased on Craigslist or recycled. He’d buy odd materials and refabricate them.

Greener Living Today
There’s one episode that my wife and I really enjoyed, the Hanna Maui episode, the bamboo house . . .

Steve Thomas
Bamboo is an interesting material because it grows so quickly. The bamboo culms shoot up to about 60 feet in months, and over three years the wall thickens. There are about 3000 species of bamboo. Some can grow anywhere in the world except the Arctic and Antarctic. In terms of fiber production, it’s a phenomenal resource because it’s a grass, not a tree. The root structure propagates runners and sequesters carbon in its little nodules. If you look at the big game—how we’re going to produce enough fiber to house a nine-billion-person world—it’s probably not going to be trees. We need plenty of forest to absorb carbon. So bamboo becomes very attractive.

That was an interesting project, not just the building but getting the kids involved. They developed real skills, stayed out of trouble. The kids were into it—you could see that on the show.

Greener Living Today
Are new episodes of Renovation Nation planned?

Steve Thomas
There are a couple, but they may not be shown. Unfortunately, Planet Green is refocusing its efforts, so I don’t know if we’ll be doing any more episodes.

Greener Living Today
What advice do you have for readers who are remodeling or building new homes and want to focus on green building?

Steve Thomas
The biggest payback is insulation. It’s boring, it doesn’t lend itself to sexy cocktail chatter like solar panels, but the better insulated a building, the less energy needed to heat and cool it. Huge rapid payback. Replace light bulbs; install a newer boiler HC (hydrocarbon) unit.

If the environmental problem is a pyramid, the bottom is conservation and the next level is efficiency. Those two tiers give you the greatest effect. The top is renewables—solar thermal, geothermal. There the tax rebates are significant.

Greener Living Today
Where are you focusing your energies now?

Steve Thomas
In the United States, energy consumption breaks down like this: building, 48 percent; industry 25 percent; transportation 27 percent. In terms of electricity, most of which is generated using fossil fuels, in particular coal, the operation of buildings accounts for 76 percent. So in terms of energy use and greenhouse gases, the building industry is huge. If you drive the building environment toward zero percent carbon emissions, even if you don’t believe in global warming, you basically solve the energy problem.

That’s what I’m focusing on.

You can learn more about Steve Thomas by visiting his web site located at:

http://www.stevethomashome.com