This Old House

This Old House is America’s No. 1 home enthusiast brand, offering trusted information and expert advice via Emmy award-winning television. We take the mystery out of home remodeling, carpentry, HVAC, landscaping, gardening and more. The crew opens the Barrington, RI, project. The challenge will be building to withstand the marine environment. Norm sees a classic home recently built. Andy's crew starts gutting the first floor.

Watch this marathon of uplifting episodes focusing on rebuilding in communities affected by natural disasters. This Old House is America’s No. 1 home enthusiast brand, offering trusted information and expert advice via Emmy award-winning television.

Watch this marathon of uplifting episodes focusing on rebuilding in communities affected by natural disasters. This Old House is America’s No. 1 home enthusiast brand, offering trusted information and expert advice via Emmy award-winning television.

The crew opens the Barrington, RI, project. The challenge will be building to withstand the marine environment. Norm sees a classic home recently built. Andy's crew starts gutting the first floor.

In October of 2012, Superstorm Sandy tore through the most populated region of the United States, leaving millions without power and hundreds of thousands of homes in ruins. Some of the worst damage was sustained on the Jersey Shore, so Kevin, Norm and Richard break with This Old House tradition to introduce not one, but three different homeowners who, despite financial hardship, miles of red tape, and lots of unanswered questions, are determined to rebuild. In the barrier island town of Bay Head, Norm meets Jed and Chris Laird, whose 1880's shore cottage had to be gutted after it was flooded under three feet of seawater. Nearby on the mainland in Point Pleasant, Carlos and Maria Santos' family of six was left homeless by the storm; Kevin learns how they plan to raise their 1950's Colonial ten feet in the air to protect it from future floods. And in Manasquan, Rita Gurry tells Richard the heartbreaking story of how, after she'd just made her last mortgage payment, she took one look at the mold Sandy left inside her flooded 1940 Cape and decided to tear it down and start fresh with a new modular home. Over eight special episodes, This Old House follows these intrepid homeowners on the path to recovery‚ learning lessons along the way about both the pitfalls and the best practices of coastal building in a post-Sandy world.

Back on the Jersey Shore, Norm meets Bay Head homeowner Thacher Brown as he leads a group of determined beachfront homeowners to pool their own resources to build a stone and sand revetment. Norm meets GC Kevin D'Anunciaçao to see how he's prepped the Bay Head house for the first of two lifts. The house-lifting contractors, led by Mitch Wilbanks, set the cribbing and thread the steel beams through the windows. They're lifting the house only four feet this time, and from the second floor structure. At the Point Pleasant project, Kevin finds homeowner Carlos Santos mired in some scheduling setbacks: the lifting crew has finally arrived but is only getting the cribbing and steel installed in the crawlspace. Richard meets up with Rita Gurry to say a last tearful goodbye to her little mold-ridden Cape as the demolition crew moves in, tears it down, and carts the debris away. Norm meets structural engineer Patrick Cronin, who explains a FEMA A zone versus a V zone, what types of foundations and pilings are required for each, and why. We see how a house properly engineered can (and did) withstand a Superstorm like Sandy.