What is it like being featured on 'This Old House'? Ask the owners of this New Jersey home

When Kay Bhothinard and Peter Field purchased their 1930s Colonial Revival in Ridgewood, New Jersey, they knew it was in need of some TLC. They loved its expansive backyard and its proximity to local schools, but recognized its outdated features and lack of functionality.
When their boiler stopped working in 2023, they finally decided to take the plunge into renovating. They gathered the plans from their architect and contacted builder Zack Dettmore, of Dettmore Home Improvements, who gave them an interesting proposal: What if they documented the project on PBS's "This Old House"?
And the rest is history.
Renovations of this three-bedroom, two-bathroom home are currently being featured on Season 46 of the iconic show, which has been showcasing home improvement projects across the nation since 1978. Field said they ultimately decided to do the show because it was something they had watched and were familiar with, so it felt like a unique experience for them.
"I watched 'This Old House.' I don't know that we would have been necessarily inclined towards working with a lot of shows, but it's been a huge joy and privilege to be a part of a real legacy element of like the best of what TV can be, in a sense," Field said. "So it was Zack's idea, but it was a pretty cool idea to come across our path."
The project — which was completed between March and November 2024 but first aired on PBS last month — involved creating a bigger and more functional kitchen, reformatting the home's first floor to make it better for entertaining, and updating the failing plumbing, HVAC and electrical systems.
The home also received a two-story rear addition to create a new primary suite, as well as new waterproofing, siding and energy-efficient windows.
"We knew that we'd have to do some things to the house, but we didn't think that it would be as big as what we ended up doing," Bhothinard said. "I mean, you buy a house and think, 'OK, we'll make some tweaks.' But we're not fixer-uppers in any way."
Sara Ferguson, senior series producer at "This Old House," said the staff finds homes to feature on the show in a variety of ways, whether from homeowners writing in or by talking to local architects in an area where they would like to work.
More real estate: What will be trending for luxury real estate in 2025? This report tells you
In the case of this Ridgewood house, Ferguson said the team had worked with Dettmore on a home in New Jersey that was previously featured on the show. She said Dettmore told them about this project, and that everything ended up falling into place.
"Peter and Kay were up for it, and it was a win," she said.
As for what the experience was like, Field said they did weekly calls with the team about the renovation project and the show's production, so it became a big part of their lives. He said they had to rent an apartment in Ridgewood's Woodside neighborhood while renovations were taking place, but that they were constantly at the house with the crew.
Overall, they said, there's a lot of cohesion from everyone on the show and it feels like everyone is one big family, both on and off the TV screen. This goes for the show's host, Kevin O'Connor, and its core cast of experts — Tom Silva, Richard Trethewey and Jenn Nawada — and for members of production who are behind the scenes.
Bhothinard and Field said it was also interesting to see how each person involved in the project was able to put their own touch on it. Dettmore, for example, was very focused on the user experience of a design, so he came up with ways to make certain things more functional in each space, they said.
"What's great is to walk through the house and remember whose fingerprints are where on this project. We had goals for the project and aesthetic choices that we made, but they could make things better," Field said. "The windows we have are Jeff Jordan, our architect, responding to our desire for light in a way we wouldn't have thought to ask for. And the HVAC system is elegant in its minimalism in a way that Richard envisioned that we wouldn't have known to ask for."
"This Old House" also typically highlights local places in the town where they're working. Bhothinard and Field said they had the opportunity to highlight the James Rose Center in Ridgewood, which is a place they love for how it showcases James Rose's perspective on landscape architecture.
"They've done a ton to renovate that place and keep that kind of living history present in the town, and we hope more people can become aware of the center," Field said. "It's a real undiscovered gem here in northern New Jersey."
O'Connor, the show's host, grew up in the near-by neighborhood of Maplewood, so they said it was also fun to see how that was woven throughout the episodes.
In the end, Bhothinard said, they officially moved back into their home in mid-December and are still getting used to all of the new updates. But overall, they both said they're grateful for this experience and how it changed their lives for the better.
"It was really wonderful to meet the whole team and get a chance to be part of a show where the project is celebrated and the craft is celebrated and the people who are doing the work are celebrated," Field said.
Maddie McGay is the real estate reporter for NorthJersey.com and The Record, covering all things worth celebrating about living in North Jersey. Find her on Instagram @maddiemcgay, on X @maddiemcgayy, and sign up for her North Jersey Living newsletter. Do you have a tip, trend or terrific house she should know about? Email her at MMcGay@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Inside the renovated New Jersey home featured on 'This Old House'

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17 hours ago

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Lesser-Known Movie Facts You Might Not Know

Before The Devil Wears Prada was even published, Fox 2000 snapped up the film rights in a preemptive deal after reading 100 pages and an outline. The manuscript by Lauren Weisberger, a former assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour, was generating significant industry buzz. Studio exec Carla Hacken recognized its cinematic potential and moved quickly to option it in 2003. Tasked with writing was Aline Brosh McKenna, who found it hard for anyone in the fashion world to talk to her because they feared being blackballed by Anna. According to McKenna, she did find someone (whom she will never name) who spoke to her, and then read the script. After reading the script, they told her, "The people in this movie are too nice. No one in that world is too nice. They don't have to be, and they don't have time to be." McKenna took the note and made "everyone a bit busier and meaner." The Devil Wears Prada isn't just one of the most iconic fashion films of the 2000s — it's a landmark in fashion cinema, period. But despite it being set in the fashion world, the film had a modest wardrobe budget of just $100,000, pushing legendary costume designer Patricia Field (who is best known for work on Sex and the City) to tap into her deep fashion Rolodex. Field envisioned Andy Sachs as a "Chanel girl" and personally reached out to the fashion house, leveraging her longtime relationship and sharing the script. Chanel eagerly came on board, excited to see their designs on a younger character. This partnership, of course, famously led to Andy's iconic Chanel boots moment. Field ended up pulling about a million dollars worth of clothes for the film. Her work on the movie was also recognized with an Oscar nomination for Best Costume in case you're wondering, Field imagined Miranda Priestly as someone who wore Donna Karan. She ended up pulling many archival pieces from Donna Karan for the film. After seeing a very rough cut of Star Wars: A New Hope in 1977, directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma were skeptical, with Coppola saying that they were concerned for George Lucas. The early version lacked finished visual effects, had scenes of WWII dogfights as place holders for space fights, and had no music. All added up, it made it hard for viewers to grasp what Lucas's full vision was. Steven Spielberg, however, was one of the few who believed in the film from the beginning and predicted it would be a massive hit. Wicked was always meant to be a movie. Before it became a Broadway phenomenon, Universal had already acquired the rights to Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel with the intention of turning it into a film. However, producer Marc Platt struggled to adapt it into a screenplay, saying, "[It] felt that it was missing something." One day, he got a call from composer Stephen Schwartz, who knew he had the rights, and Schwartz asked him if he had ever thought of making it into a musical. That's when the "lightbulb went off" in his head, and Platt decided to work with Schwartz to make it into a musical. He thought that if the musical was successful enough, it could be turned into a movie. The term "prequel" is often associated with the Star Wars prequel films. However, those weren't the first movies to use the word. The 1979 movie Butch and Sundance: The Early Years is credited as being the film that helped popularize the term. The movie was a prequel to 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In 1988, when it was announced that Michael Keaton was cast as Bruce Wayne/Batman in Tim Burton's Batman, fans were outraged and very skeptical, reportedly sending over 50,000 protest letters to Warner Bros. At the time, Keaton was best known for comedic roles like Mr. Mom, and many felt he lacked the physicality and gravitas required to play the Dark Knight. Critics and fans also feared that, because of his casting, the film would be too campy or repeat the tone of the 1960s TV series. Similar to Michael Keaton, fans were not happy that Heath Ledger had been cast as The Joker in The Dark Knight. Today, it's hard to even imagine anyone else in the Oscar-winning role. However, when it was first announced that he would be playing the role in 2006, people online lost their collective shit, thinking he was too much of a "pretty boy" for the role, wouldn't have the chops to do it, and overall just a really bad choice. Some even campaigned for him to be removed from the part. After Chris Farley's death (who was originally cast as the voice of Shrek), Nicolas Cage was offered the role by his friend and the head of DreamWorks, Jeffrey Katzenberg. However, Cage turned down the role because he didn't want to play an ugly green ogre. In a 2013 interview with Today, he clarified what he meant by that when he turned down voicing the character, saying, "Truth is, I'm not afraid to be ugly in a movie.... When you're drawn, in a way it says more about how children are going to see you than anything else, and I so care about that." In All About Eve, Bette Davis as Margo Channing wears an off-the-shoulder silk cocktail dress in the party scene that is not only one of the most iconic dresses in film history, but has also become synonymous with Davis herself. Legendary costume designer Edith Head designed the dress; however, it was not meant to be off the shoulder — it was supposed to be a square neckline. The dress was made late and delivered to the set right before filming the scene. According to Head, she came to the studio to find Davis wearing a dress that "didn't fit at all... Someone had miscalculated, and the entire bodice and neckline were too big." Horrified, Head prepared to go tell the film's director that the dress was not ready, but Davis shrugged it off, pulled it down around her shoulders, and quipped, "Don't you like it better like this anyway?" As part of her contract, Glenn Close got to keep all her Cruella de Vil costumes from 101 Dalmatians and 102 Dalmatians. However, according to Close, when Disney "found out how expensive they were, they were unhappy that it was in my contract." Disney then offered to create replica outfits for her to take instead of the originals, but she said no. It's hard to imagine anyone other than Emma Thompson as the deliciously wicked Baroness in Cruella — her performance was pitch-perfect and effortlessly commanding. But surprisingly, she wasn't Disney's first pick for the role. The studio initially eyed Nicole Kidman to play the icy fashion designer. 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Despite critical acclaim, its initial theatrical run fell short financially. It wasn't until years later — thanks to frequent re-releases and television broadcasts — that the film finally turned a profit. Also, the reason the film has become such an iconic piece of pop culture is that starting in 1956, it began having yearly TV showings that helped introduce it to new generations of kids over the decades. The first gay kiss in a film was in 1927's Wings. The movie is about two World War I combat pilots and close friends fighting for the same woman's affection. But many have pointed out over the decades that the film has a subtle gay subtext about the two being more than just friends. Wings is also noted as the first film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Truman Capote, who wrote the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, disliked Audrey Hepburn's performance as Holly Golightly in the film adaptation. 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As a result, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis rewrote the climax to take place at the Hill Valley clock tower, using a lightning strike to power the time machine instead. This change not only saved the budget, but it became one of the most iconic scenes in movie history. And lastly, prior to its release in 1997, many critics and Hollywood insiders predicted that Titanic would be a box office bomb. And there were several reasons why it was predicted to be a failure. One of which was that, at the time, it was the most expensive movie ever made and was getting compared to the costly Waterworld, which had been released a couple of years before and had not managed to be a huge success because it, like Titanic, was the then–most expensive movie ever made. Another was that Titanic also took a long time to film. Going way over schedule delayed the release of the movie, as it was originally meant to be released during the summer (the blockbuster movie season). 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Boston Globe

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William Cran, ‘Frontline' documentarian, is dead at 79

He began his career with the BBC, but he mostly worked as an independent producer, toggling between jobs on both sides of the Atlantic. He was most closely associated with WGBH's 'Frontline,' for which he produced 20 documentaries on a wide range of subjects -- some historical, like the four-part series 'From Jesus to Christ' (1998) and 'The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover' (1993), and some focused on current events, including 'Who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch' (1995). Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up He won a slew of honors, including four Emmys, four duPont-Columbia University awards, two Peabodys, and an Overseas Press Club Award. Advertisement In 1986, he produced 'The Story of English,' an Emmy-winning nine-episode series for the BBC and PBS about how English became the world's dominant language. He, with journalists Robert MacNeil, the PBS news anchor, and Robert McCrum, turned it into a book. Mr. Cran produced two multipart documentaries based on books by historian Daniel Yergin: 'The Prize' (1990), a Pulitzer-winning history of oil, and 'The Commanding Heights' (1998, with Joseph Stanislaw), about the history of the modern global economy. Advertisement These were complicated stories, but Mr. Cran was able to frame them around characters and narrative threads that kept viewers engaged over several nights. 'I learned from him that less is more, that the script is not a shortened version of the book, but rather captions to go with the picture,' Yergin wrote in an email. 'He always stuck to the facts, but he always wanted dramatic tension.' Both documentaries were well-received, despite their potentially dry material. 'Using every familiar element of the documentarian's art, producer-director William Cran has created a masterpiece,' The Washington Post wrote of 'The Commanding Heights.' William Cran was born Dec. 11, 1945, in Hobart, on the island state of Tasmania, Australia. His mother, Jean (Holliday) Cran, was a teacher, and his father, John, was a science lecturer. The family moved to London when William was 6. He studied classics at Oxford, and though he knew early on that he wanted to make documentaries, he also dabbled in theater, directing two plays in London. After graduating in 1968, he became a trainee at the BBC, where he rose to producer, using then-novel techniques such as reconstructed scenes, and pursuing new genres including true crime. One early documentary was '1971 Luton Postmaster Murder,' about two men who were wrongly convicted of killing a British postmaster. But Mr. Cran grew tired of being what he called a 'company man,' and left the BBC after eight years. He moved to Toronto in 1976, becoming a senior producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.'s investigative news program 'The Fifth Estate.' Two years later, David Fanning, an executive at WGBH in Boston, reached out to him about a documentary program he was creating called 'World.' Advertisement Mr. Cran flew to Boston for a meeting -- and got stuck in the blizzard of 1978. While holed up at Fanning's home, the two cooked up an idea for Mr. Cran's first documentary for the program, 'Chachaji: My Poor Relation,' a story of modern India told through the family of writer Ved Mehta. 'What was particular about Bill is that each one of his films is different,' Fanning said in an interview, adding, 'He would do these surprising things. He would say: 'I think I want to build a set. I want to build a bedroom in the studio.'' Fanning trusted Mr. Cran so much that in 1983, when 'World' was rebranded as 'Frontline,' with a tighter focus on current events, he asked Mr. Cran to produce its first two documentaries, with the first about corruption in the NFL. The next 'Frontline' subject, '88 Seconds in Greensboro,' probed the 1979 deaths of five people after a pro-communist march was attacked by members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party in North Carolina. Four local camera crews had filmed the bloodshed. Mr. Cran and his team 'edited the combined footage into an amazingly complete anatomy of a murder,' wrote TV reviewer David Bianculli in the Akron Beacon Journal. In 1993, Mr. Cran led a 'Frontline' documentary team that looked into possible abuses and compromises by the longtime FBI director in 'The Secret File on J. Edgar Hoover.' The four-part series built a case that Hoover, who led the agency (and its forerunner) from 1924 to 1972, potentially made concessions to organized crime and other groups to avoid public disclosures of his gay relationships. Advertisement 'Our investigation found that this master of political blackmail was wide open to blackmail himself,' Mr. Cran said. 'There is overwhelming evidence that the mob knew it had nothing to fear from Hoover's FBI.' One of Mr. Cran's most historically expansive documentaries, the series 'From Jesus to Christ' (1998), took shape after Fanning met with a WGBH producer, Marilyn Mellowes, who was working on a documentary to bring more cultural and political context to the life of Jesus and the New Testament. Fanning agreed to bring aboard additional resources, including Mr. Cran as a senior producer and director. 'We make no judgment about faith, and we make no judgments about divinity,' Fanning told journalists. The documentary framed the life of Jesus in the wider realities of Roman-controlled Galilee, described by scholars as a center of Jewish resistance and activism. Jesus, meanwhile, was not raised amid a pastoral idyll - as portrayed in some accounts - but mingled with people from across the Roman world and was probably well aware of the political foment around him, the documentary suggested. Mr. Cran's first marriage, to Araminta Wordsworth, ended in divorce. His second wife, Stephanie Tepper, who worked with him as a producer on several films, died in 1997. His third wife, Polly Bide, died in 2003. He married Vicki Barker, a CBS journalist, in 2014. She survives him, as do three daughters from his second marriage, Jessica, Rebecca and Chloe Cran; his sister, Vicki Donovan; and a granddaughter. Many of Mr. Cran's films continue to be watched. 'Two months ago,' Yergin said, 'I was walking up Madison Avenue and someone -- out of the blue, startled to see me -- stopped me to say that watching 'Commanding Heights' had changed his life.' Advertisement Material from The Washington Post was used in this obituary.

New York Post

3 days ago

• New York Post

Pope Leo XIV has scads of famous cousins — including Madonna, Justin Bieber and more

From Holy See to Hollywood. A noted historian dug into Pope Leo XIV's family tree, discovering it includes a who's who of A-list celebrities, political figures and even a famous novelist. Harry Louis Gates Jr., longtime host of PBS' 'Finding Your Roots,' a docuseries that explores the ancestry of noteworthy people, recently collaborated with genealogists at the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami and American Ancestors and traced the new pontiff's family history back to the 1500s, making some unexpected discoveries. 3 Pope Leo XIV became the first American pontiff on May 8. AP For starters, Leo XIV comes from a strikingly diverse background, with ancestors born all around the world, from France, Italy, Spain and the US to Cuba, Canada, Haiti and Guadeloupe, an archipelago nation in the eastern Caribbean. The pope also has at least 17 black relatives, including his grandfather, Joseph Nerval Martínez, who was born in Haiti. Leo XIV also had a dozen ancestors who were slaveholders, eight of whom were black. Pope Leo XIV's ascent to the papacy was historical significance partly due to him being the first pontiff to hail from North America, and his ancestry includes a number of household names from the continent. He's ninth cousins — many times removed — with superstars including Madonna, Justin Bieber and Angelina Jolie, as well as Hillary Clinton and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. 3 Pop icon Madonna is one of Pope Leo XIV's famous cousins. AFP via Getty Images Rounding out his roster of famous cousins is 'On the Road' author Jack Kerouac. Pope Leo XIV, 70, became pontiff May 9 after just two days and four rounds of voting by the College of Cardinals at the Vatican. 3 Pope Leo XIV is ninth cousins, many times removed, with singer Justin Bieber. GC Images He is the 267th pope in the history of the Roman Catholic church, and follows Pope Francis, 88, who died April 21 after battling respiratory illness culminating in a stroke and heart failure.