the original hank wrote:

i stopped watching "holmes on homes" back in the day. every time mike pointed out something (bad), as a homeowner, i kept getting depressed.

Me too. Fortunately, we live in a solid ranch-style mid-60s bungalow back when builders used real wood (and lots of it), not pressboard (aka glued-together chips and sawdust), and actually seemed to care about what they were doing. Built like a battleship.

As a new sub-division was being mass-built near us, my wife and I strolled through to observe construction techniques. OH MY FREAKIN' GOD, Mike Holmes would have had a coronary on the spot. Even the poured basement walls had a two-inch gap in some corners, which they later "patched". Roof sheathing was 3/8" waferboard...not even plywood. At twilight, you can see every truss outline on the roof due to the sagging of the waferboard.

Those same houses, five years later, are selling in the $900,000 to $1,000,000 range, but I saw how they were built.

 

Used to do renos. While taking a client through a supplier they'd say, "We need this for the job right?  Mike Holmes uses this stuff".  I'd reply, Mike Holmes doesn't pay full price for it if anything at all.  And it's overkill for the job.

LongTimeLurker wrote:

The thing that set my dad off the most about Holmes was that he would go into a house to fix some renovation disaster and tear everything out, toss it and buy all new materials. My father was the original recycler and he always complained Holmes could have reused a lot of the materials, such as the lumber, and saved the homeowner a pile of money.
 

That wouldn't make the sponsors warm and fuzzy.