Ronda Kaysen

NEW YORK — For New Yorkers trying to buy a co-op apartment, the interview is often a grueling, baffling process.

Few New York City real estate experiences are as surreal. Here you are, days from closing on an apartment, sitting in a room across from people you hope to call your neighbors, trying to convince them that you’re normal — or at least as normal as they are. You’d think an activity as arcane as a board interview would be a mere formality. Yet it’s not.

The board interview happens at the end of the purchase process, after buyers have been approved for a loan, handed a nonrefundable deposit to the seller, and completed a board package exposing their entire financial life. By this point, buyers are so vested in the sale that they’re hardly in a position to walk away.

But the board members are not done. Most buyers who make it to the interview get the apartment, but some fail this vague test and get red-carded. (There is no firm data, but brokers and co-op lawyers estimate that about 3% to 5% of co-op applicants get rejected.) The board holds the keys to the clubhouse and could deny entry without explanation. All a buyer can do is show up and smile.

There are no hard and fast rules for what an interview is or how it should proceed. Some buyers have faced board members playing a good cop/bad cop routine to see if a candidate folds under pressure. Others get riddled with questions about their pedigree: Do they know the right people? Are they in the right social clubs? Then there are the boards that see the event as a chance to break the ice and meet a new neighbor, all while quietly assessing an applicant’s mental state. Walk in the room, and there’s no telling what you’ll get.

“It’s like a Shakespeare play — you have all these different characters,” said Karen Kelley, an associate broker for Compass. And a buyer’s job is to figure them out. “Don’t get played by anybody who appears to be your friend; don’t get put off by anybody who is acting like your foe.”

That’s what Kelley did when she bought her first apartment on the Upper West Side back when she was a young Manhattan School of Music student and had just landed her first national television commercial. Flush with cash for a down payment, she found a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a brownstone with floor-to-ceiling French windows, hardwood floors and a fireplace. “It was Parisian,” she said of the place.

She assumed the board interview was merely an opportunity to meet her new neighbors; they’d already approved her financial package. So when the board members asked her to sing and then retreated to their respective apartments for the performance, she gave it her all, belting out Puccini’s “O Mio Babbino Caro.” “I let it rip,” she said.

It didn’t take long for the only board member remaining in the room to motion that she should tone it down. It dawned on Kelley that this was not a voice audition but a test to gauge if her voice would trigger a noise complaint. “It was a total realization of ‘Oh no,’” she said.

The audition ended and she agreed to practice at hours that wouldn’t disrupt her downstairs neighbor, who worked from home. With that assurance, she got the apartment. Now, as a real estate agent, Kelley counsels buyers to choose their words carefully and say as little as possible while still somehow appearing relaxed and personable.

“It’s an inquisition,” said Doreen Courtright, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman. “I always tell my buyers, ‘When you go to the interview, don’t ask questions. Don’t say anything negative at all.’”

In other words, now is not the time to find out anything about the building where you’ll soon be living. So don’t ask when the dated lobby will get a makeover or how to contact the super for repairs. Just smile and survive.

Boards, meanwhile, see this exercise as a last line of defense against trouble. No one wants to be the one who let a problem shareholder into the community. Steven Wagner, a Manhattan real estate lawyer, is president of the board of Southgate, the co-op where he lives in Midtown Manhattan. He thinks of the board interview as part cocktail party, part mental health exam. One member of the admissions committee likens the process to “screening for psychosis,” he said.

“If you were having a conversation with me and I was nuts, you’d know it. I’d be saying crazy things or trying to talk over you; something would be off,” Wagner said. The same goes for a buyer fielding questions. “You can get a sense of whether that person is playing with a full deck.”

With the bar set so low, most buyers pass the Southgate test, even those who make for terrible conversationalists. At one interview, a woman buying an apartment for her sister came across as dishonest. Her sister, though, seemed lovely.

“We looked at each other and said, ‘We’re not going to be living with the one who lies incessantly; we’re going to be living with the one who is very sweet,’” Wagner said. So they let her in.

It doesn’t take much to derail a perfectly tense interview.

Stephanie Sladkus nearly did so at the end of one for a Midtown junior-four that she was buying in 2000 with her husband, Steven Sladkus, a real estate lawyer. As the interview wrapped up, the board asked the couple if they had anything they wanted to add. That’s when Stephanie Sladkus, who worked in magazine publishing at the time, said, with a straight face, that she liked to jump rope in high heels at 3 a.m.

The room fell silent. “It was almost like my head did a slow-motion turn left to her, like ‘Whaaaaat?’” her husband said.

She didn’t see why her comment was a problem. “There was, like, a beat of silence where Steven’s heart stopped,” she said. “And the board looked at me kind of funny, and I went, like, ‘Ha ha, kidding!’”

Her husband was certain they would lose the apartment and maybe the deposit and maybe his fledgling career as a real estate lawyer, because what real estate lawyer bombs a board interview?

But his wife was unfazed. “I grew up in New Jersey. Who knew about board interviews?” she said. “What’s there to be nervous about? Seriously, we’re two well-groomed, very nice people. We don’t stink. Why shouldn’t you joke?”

The next morning they got the call. The board could take a joke. They got the apartment.

And she never jumped rope in heels.

This article originally appeared in

(Right at Home)

How to Ace a Co-op Board Interview

A few years ago, I visited the house where I grew up. I hadn’t been back since I was 15, but there I was on a day trip with my parents and my husband, and wouldn’t it be fun to pop in and take a look around?

The surprised homeowner obliged and we stepped inside what was once the foyer of a midcentury-style house, but was now part of a large open space with no walls separating the living room from the dining room and kitchen. The homeowner, who said she had lived in the house for a few years, was thrilled to show us the changes she’d made. All I could think was: Where did our dining room go?

I peeked into my childhood bedroom, now her walk-in closet. “I used to sleep in there,” I said, sheepishly. Admittedly, it had been a dinky bedroom, but it made for a pretty nice closet.

Mostly, walking through the space felt like trying to scrub a dirty window clean. Oh right! The door to the deck was off the living room, not the kitchen. And that endless hallway to my parents’ room was actually just a few feet long. As I giddily showed my husband the space that had once been my childhood play room, my mother took a closer look at the new finishes.

The homeowner proudly showed us how she had remodeled the master bathroom. “I took out this old tile that someone had put in,” she said.

Once we had said our goodbyes and left, my mother let loose. “That was expensive Italian tile!” she said. “What was she thinking?” She was not pleased with the open-concept living room either: “That was a mistake.”

While I was happily reliving my childhood, my mother was reviewing the new owner’s remodeling choices.

The experience of visiting a childhood home works wonders if you’re angling for a trip down memory lane. It brings fuzzy and disjointed memories into focus. But a house is not static — tiles change, walls come down. If you walk into a house that has been radically altered since you lived in it, those changes may leave you feeling like someone erased you from the picture, especially if you were the one who made those earlier design decisions.

Or, if you’re the unwitting homeowner suddenly cast in the role of playing host to a version of history that no longer exists, you may wonder if these visitors are interlopers trying to undermine your claim to the place you call home.

“Who is the truer owner? The more original owner? The one who goes back the furthest? Or the one who lives there now?” said Gretchen Rubin, author of several books, including “Outer Order, Inner Calm.” “What does it mean to own a house?”

Rubin is not above putting her mark on spaces that were once hers. After her grandmother died, Rubin, who was in her 30s at the time, took a knife and carved a nick into a built-in cabinet before her family sold the house where she had spent so much time. “I remember thinking I would really like to come back and see if this nick is still here,” she said.

We often want to check in on the places where we once lived. A third of American adults have visited their childhood homes in what Jerry M. Burger, the author of “Returning Home: Reconnecting with Our Childhoods,” describes as a “widespread phenomenon.” We may take these journeys because we want to remember our youth — and what better way to do it than by walking around a house that’s no longer yours?

For most of us, the experience is positive, so long as the house is still intact and bears some resemblance to what it looked like when we grew up there. Big changes made by other people after we’ve left usually make us unhappy. And if you show up to find the house has been demolished and replaced with something else, expect to feel devastated.

“There is this need to feel that your childhood still exists in your memory and it’s an important part of you,” said Burger, a professor emeritus of psychology at Santa Clara University.

But what happens when someone shows up at your house with fond memories of a time before you lived there? You may enjoy hearing stories about your home before it was yours, or you may find the experience unsettling, like someone is trying to lay claim to a place that is rightfully yours.

In 2017, Pippa Biddle was unnerved when she learned that her new boyfriend, Benjamin Davidson, and his family had, by sheer coincidence, once lived in the house across the street from the house where she grew up in Katonah, New York, and where her parents still live. It was unsettling because it made clear that her house had a history she was not privy to.

Davidson’s family was close friends with the previous owners of the house and had visited it frequently. Davidson’s family had moved away by the time the Biddles bought the house in the mid-1990s.

By Christmas 2018, Biddle and Davidson were engaged, and so the Davidson family came to a holiday party at the Biddle family home. “I was really anxious about it before they came,” Biddle, now 27, said. “Will they think we messed it up? Because we did change a lot. We put so much love and care into this home over the years, and the idea that someone already knew it and would be disappointed by what we did was a scary thought.”

As Biddle and her mother gave the Davidsons a tour of the renovated four-bedroom house, Biddle, a writer, worried about what they would report back to the previous owners. “To have the house framed in that way is very weird, where it goes from ‘our house’ to ‘their old house,’” said Biddle, who now lives in Germantown, New York, with Davidson, 28, whom she married in June.

During the party, Davidson gathered on the front porch with his parents and sisters to take family pictures to send to the previous homeowners. Biddle was baffled by their enthusiasm for her house and felt strange as she snapped the family photo that did not include her family. “The idea of someone else caring enough about the house to want a picture on the porch of it, felt slightly strange,” she said. “It’s mine. I’m greedy.”

Of course, the house will always be Biddle’s childhood home. But it was someone else’s, too. The collision of the two worlds made clear that her life there was but one chapter in the life of the house.

In the years since I visited my old home, my childhood memories have remained intact, and separate from those of the house I visited that afternoon. Yes, I remember the new open layout, but that version doesn’t compete with my memories of Thanksgivings spent in our cozy dining room, with my mother walking through the swinging door from the kitchen carrying hot serving platters.

Even though I can still vividly remember those Italian tiles in my parent’s bathroom, I cannot, for the life of me, remember what that new bathroom even looked like.

Can You Go Home Again?

Earlier this year, I faced a conundrum that many of us who work from home know well: Where in the house can I actually work?

Unless you’re blessed with a home large enough for a dedicated office, or are a truly nomadic worker and able to set up shop on a sofa with nothing more than a cup of tea and your laptop, you’re inevitably going to have to carve out space in a room that isn’t naturally intended for work.

Any spot you choose has the potential to diminish what you had before. Set up camp in your bedroom, and you’re left staring down your desk when you’re trying to get to sleep, all those unanswered emails calling to you as you lie awake at 4 a.m. Move to the kitchen or dining room, and snack time becomes an endless loop. (Why work when you could sample that fresh salsa from the farmers market?) Steal a corner of the living room, and suddenly your prime social area feels like some weird break room outside an office cubicle.

These were my options when I relinquished my airy bedroom office to my son when he outgrew the room he had long shared with his sister. I knew this day would come, and yet, when it did, I still didn’t have a good answer for where to go.

So I went to the place where all objects with no obvious home inevitably end up: the basement.

I convinced myself it could work and outfitted the room with as many inviting details as I could muster. I installed new flooring and took out the drop ceiling, exposing the wood beams, which added height and dimension to the space. I painted the room a light color and installed recessed lighting, turning part of the space into a cozy TV room for the family. The rest would be mine. I bought an aromatherapy diffuser, filling the air with the smell of citrus and rosemary. I filled the built-in shelves with books and photographs. I even had a window. I thought, how bad could it be?

In the end, it was the window that did me in. Half the size of a regular window, and positioned above my head when I was seated, it provided an unobstructed view of the back of a shrub. If I craned my neck, I could see the sky and briefly catch a glimpse of daylight, not unlike a prisoner trapped in a medieval dungeon.

Increasingly, Americans are working from home, either telecommuting or freelancing. Nearly a quarter of full-time employees worked at home at least part of the time in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet, our home work spaces often don’t reflect our eagerness to get out of the office, leaving us dissatisfied with what could otherwise be a great setup.

Sure, it’s nice not to have to get dressed and get on the train every morning. But the arrangement can quickly lose its luster. A 2015 study published in “Psychological Science in the Public Interest” found that telecommuting can blur the lines between work life and family life, leading to family conflict, while also leaving workers feeling socially and professionally isolated. You know what’s isolating? Sitting alone all day in a basement, accompanied only by the low rumble of the boiler.

In “My Creative Space: How to Design Your Home to Stimulate Ideas and Spark Innovation,” a book to be published in October, architect Donald M. Rattner argues that we don’t give our work spaces all the attention they deserve, and should instead think of our entire home as a creative vehicle, designing it with colors, light, music and art that aim to inspire.

“People do a lot of things that they don’t realize are contradictory to what makes for a good office space,” Rattner said.

Too often we find half-baked solutions for our work needs, like converting a closet, yes, a closet, into an office. Empty it of its contents, shove a desk in it and voilà, you have a home office. “Your mental space contracts in direct proportion to your physical space,” Rattner said of such a setup. “Your mind is going to narrow.”

But sometimes it’s your options that are narrow. When Savannah Ashour, 41, a freelance book doctor and ghostwriter, moved into a studio apartment in Los Angeles five years ago, she wasn’t sure how long she would be freelancing, so she didn’t want to invest too much time and money creating a home office. Her sunny eat-in kitchen had a window facing a jacaranda tree, and was large enough to squeeze in a desk, an Aeron chair and a table. With her back to the rest of the apartment, she could forget that she was at home and focus.

Last year, long after it became clear that this was no temporary arrangement, she committed to the space. She upgraded to a white sitting-standing desk from Ikea and bought a cheerful red-and-orange outdoor rug from Target to define the space. Rather than buy a traditional office chair, which she worried would be an eyesore in a tiny apartment, she opted for a stool where she could sit, lean or move aside to stand.

“Something about being shut into an apartment by yourself to work, you kind of need to build in extra perks” by making the space aesthetically pleasing and stealing the best assets, like the window facing a glorious tree, for work, she said. “At least you feel like there’s a nice trade-off for all the challenges that come with working from home.”

After three months cloistered in my basement dungeon, my bedroom started to look like a much more appealing option, despite all the warnings that it would ruin the serenity of my sleeping space. On one particularly dreary afternoon, I dragged my desk upstairs, planting it on the far wall. With my back to the bed, and facing a window, I could almost forget where I was.

Sharing your office with the bedroom brings new challenges. In the mornings, I’m often greeted with a discarded shirt, tossed on my chair by my better half, or an empty glass of water left on my desk. When I step in the bedroom, it’s hard not to notice the huge computer monitor staring back at me — hardly a soothing aesthetic. These inconveniences serve as daily reminders that this is still a temporary measure — an improvement from the dark underworld, but no equal to the charming space I had before. The reshuffling game feels far from over as I eye other parts of the house for a more perfect little corner.

Or maybe, with a few modifications, my bedroom office could be good enough. Anjie Cho, an interior architect and feng shui designer, keeps her home office in her bedroom, saying that the arrangement, while not ideal, is a common one. She suggested I could cover the monitor with a scarf at night, or hang a curtain or add a screen to separate the sleeping area from the work space. I doubt a screen would work, as it would mean losing light to the rest of the bedroom, but a scarf draped over the monitor seems simple enough.

The key, Cho said, is to give the space the attention it deserves. “If you have a home office where you’re serious about your career,” she said, “then you have to find a way to carve out some space.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/realestate/finding-the-right-place-for-a-home-office.html" id="932a434c-5c40-35ae-ab13-a0515d28c490">The New York Times</a>.

Finding the Right Place for a Home Office

“This Old House,” which began chronicling home renovations in 1979, was one of the first such shows to air on national television and arguably helped create the DIY nation we all live in.

“It’s like cooking,” said Vila, who is now 73 and spends his time sitting on the boards of various nonprofits, living mostly in Palm Beach, Florida, and occasionally on the Upper East Side and Martha’s Vineyard.

Say you want to rip out your bathroom linoleum and replace it with ceramic tile. First, maybe you get inspiration from TV; next, you binge a bunch of random YouTube videos or find a how-to video on ThisOldHouse.com or Vila’s website, BobVila.com. Armed with your shopping list, you head to the store, get your ingredients, come home and lose a weekend laying a floor.

“At the end of the project, you’re a hero,” Vila said.

Four decades after Vila and the rest of the original “This Old House” crew introduced viewers to the concept of watching contractors turn tired homes into pretty ones, knocking down walls is big entertainment. “This Old House” is a powerful brand with a magazine, a website and a spinoff, “Ask This Old House.”

The show’s creator, Russell Morash, whose credits include “The French Chef” with Julia Child and “The Victory Garden,” was crowned the “father of how-to television” by the National Academy of Television Arts &amp; Sciences when it awarded him a lifetime achievement Emmy in 2014. His brand of educational television paved the way for a genre of reality TV centered on what would otherwise be mundane tasks.

Now the competition is stiff. Renovation-hungry viewers can tune in 24 hours a day to HGTV’s endless loop of angst-ridden shows, including “Love It or List It” and “Flip or Flop.” Other networks, including Bravo, have their own high-drama renovation lineups, with shows like “Buying It Blind” and “Flipping Exes.”

But “This Old House” didn’t originally follow the formula of the anxious homeowner saved by a crew of knowledgeable tradesmen that has come to define the genre. Its first season, which aired on WGBH Boston, a local public television station, had no homeowner at all. Instead, it chronicled the restoration of a vacant and dilapidated Victorian house in Dorchester, Massachusetts, that the station bought and later sold. PBS picked up the unlikely hit show the following season, and in 1982, producers featured a homeowner restoring a Greek Revival house in Arlington, Massachusetts. After that, the formula took hold.

To find the right house, the show accepts proposals from homeowners, architects and builders, selecting homes based on the scope of work, budget, timing, style and location. (Vila said that Morash particularly liked houses in warmer places, like Santa Barbara, California, where a winter spent on location would be more appealing than in cold New England.)

There have been changes over the years. Scenes are shorter, and features like “sweat equity,” where homeowners strap on a tool belt and get to work, add drama.

The houses are different, too. One Rhode Island house featured in 2018 was described as an “idea house,” with vacation-focused elements like a plunge pool, barbecue station and outdoor shower.

But despite the competition from flashier cable TV shows, “This Old House” has largely stuck to its formula, with a cast that includes members from 1979 who still work on one house over multiple episodes.

And it’s a formula that continues to work. In the first quarter of 2019, “This Old House” reached 2.043 million households, and “Ask This Old House” reached 1.876 million households, making them the two top-rated shows in their category, beating HGTV’s entire lineup, according to Nielsen data provided by “This Old House.”

“What HGTV is doing is great, but we look at this content in a different manner. We don’t redo a house in one episode,” said Dan Suratt, chief executive of This Old House Ventures. “People want that level of detail, and that’s what’s lacking in the other shows.”

In other words, rather than a 30-second shot referring to insulation, “This Old House” viewers get an in-depth primer on choosing and installing it.

Vila, who left the show in 1989 over a dispute about his celebrity endorsements, could be credited with creating the handyman-hero aesthetic: the rumpled, but somehow polished workman in a flannel shirt, jeans and work boots. That uniform has come to be synonymous with home improvement television, with variations worn by current HGTV stars like Jonathan Scott of “Property Brothers” and Chip Gaines of “Fixer Upper.”

“Bob inspired an entire generation of industry professionals — I was one of them,” said Gaines, who is starting a new TV network in 2020 to replace Discovery’s DIY Network, with his wife, Joanna Gaines. “He single-handedly shifted the narrative of an age-old trade.”

By the 1990s, Vila had his own show, “At Home with Bob Vila,” and was making periodic cameos on the sitcom “Home Improvement,” where Tim Allen played the fictional host of a show called “Tool Time” and Vila played his rival.

To celebrate the longevity of “This Old House,” PBS recently turned an Upper West Side brownstone into a temporary set for an anniversary special that will air next month and that brings Vila together for the first time with his successors, Kevin O’Connor, the show’s current host, and Steve Thomas, the host from 1989 to 2003, for a round-table discussion. The show will also include interviews with past homeowners and footage from some of the episodes.

O’Connor, a former banker who was tapped to be the show’s host after impressing the producers when he and his wife, Kathleen, appeared as homeowners on an episode of “Ask This Old House,” said he saw the hunger for fix-it-up programming continuing to grow.

“If you’re spending 30% of your time watching home improvement, you’re going to catch the bug; you’re going to get an interest,” O’Connor, 51, said. Finish watching an episode, he added, and “you can fire up YouTube and figure out how to build a deck.”

Thomas, who became the host of the show after producers noticed his book and documentary about learning to sail in Micronesia, is less enthusiastic about DIY mania. “The guys on YouTube may or may not be smoking crack,” he said. “You get incorrect, inaccurate and basically bad information on YouTube.”

Thomas, 66, now lives in Port Clyde, Maine, and is still renovating houses, including two adjacent cottages on Hupper Island that he sold to Chief Justice John Roberts, the first in 2006 and the second in 2016.

Unlike many shows, “This Old House” has never shied away from the grittier bits of home renovation. In the final episode of the 2017 renovation of a home in Newton, Massachusetts, Richard Trethewey, the show’s plumbing and heating expert since 1980, showcased a new heating system, explaining in detail how the heat pumps, air handlers and refrigerant lines worked.

The highlight of the scene was new radiant heating — in the garage, of all places. “This place will be comfortable for years to come,” he told viewers.

Later in the episode, Liz McQuillan Delfino, the homeowner, showed off what would have been the highlight on any other show: the new kitchen, with an island made of reclaimed oak from an Ohio barn, a sliding barn door for the pantry and a tile depicting the goddess Fortuna on the wall behind the stove.

“She stands on a ball, and her cloak waves in the wind, and you never know if you’re going to get good luck or bad luck,” said Delfino, 37, who grew up in the house, inheriting it from her mother, and now lives there with her husband, Joe Delfino, 37, and their two children.

Yet even from the start, “This Old House” wasn’t entirely about boilers and knob-and-tube wiring. It has long dabbled in the celebrity cameo.

In an episode that aired on New Year’s Eve in 1983, Vila visited the new Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, with Ivana Trump providing a tour of a model apartment. Wearing a royal blue dress draped with a scarf, she pointed out the mirrored walls, lacquered finishes and a mural with 24-karat gold details. “As you can see, all our clientele are black-tie people, very sophisticated people, and this is the feel that they like,” Trump said.

“Ivana has this marvelous accent and was this beautiful woman,” Vila recalled. “She kept saying, ‘onyx, gold, silk.’ I’ve never forgotten it.”

A young Donald Trump then walked Vila through the atrium, explaining the scope of his investment. “When you’re going to spend the kind of money that we’ve spent — where we’ve spent for the finest marble, for the finest bronze, for the finest everything else — you have to be careful,” Trump told him.

Vila remembers being underwhelmed by his encounter with the future president. “How shall I put it without being castigated?” he said. “It was not exciting television.”

Over the years, dozens of homes have gotten the “This Old House” treatment. And for some of those homeowners, like Terry and Sima Maitland, the experience of a season spent on television was as memorable as the improvements themselves.

In the early 1990s, the couple and their three children were living in a cramped 1710 house in Acton, Massachusetts, with oddly shaped rooms, virtually no closets and a tiny kitchen in need of new appliances. Also, the pipes repeatedly froze, bricks were crumbling and falling into the chimney flues, and the only bathtub would not drain.

“We always had this fantasy that ‘This Old House’ was going to come and save us,” recalled Terry Maitland, 71, a real estate broker who still lives in the house with Sima Maitland, also 71, a retired teacher.

So the Maitlands sent the show a letter, begging for help. Eventually, a producer called, and then a location scout paid them a visit. Their $150,000 renovation became a subject of the 1994 season. Like other homeowners featured on the show, the Maitlands paid for the renovation, but they got deeply discounted materials from companies angling for a mention of their products, resulting in a higher-end renovation than they would have had otherwise.

The season chronicled Tom Silva, the show’s longtime general contractor, building an addition that expanded the house from 2,200 square feet to 3,400. The addition made room for a new kitchen, family room, laundry room, powder room and a master suite with a bathroom.

“There was a certain team spirit between Tommy and the producers,” Maitland said. “It was very collegial.”

The family became local celebrities. For years, tourists from as far away as Kansas and Minnesota drove up the driveway to photograph the restored house. One fan sent a tool belt to the school where Sima Maitland worked, asking if Norm Abram, the show’s master carpenter, could sign it. (He did.)

During the months those episodes aired, the couple were accosted by locals with strong opinions. A shopper at a paint store once stopped Maitland to tell her to hold her ground about an on-air dispute regarding kitchen cabinets materials.

“Somebody said, ‘I know who you are! Don’t let them push you around. Get your cherry cabinets,’” Maitland recalled. “The guys on the show used to call it public takedowns.” (Sima Maitland got her cherry cabinets.)

Twenty-five years later, the Maitlands have made few changes to the house. “Still, every time I come up the driveway I can’t believe we live here,” Terry Maitland said.

Not all the show’s guests have been eager participants. David and Janet McCue knew little about the show and had no interest in appearing on it when they were approached in 2001 by Thomas, a member of their yacht club. A mutual friend introduced them, telling Thomas that the McCues were planning to restore their 1883 shingled waterfront house in Manchester, Massachusetts, which had been stripped of much of its character during a previous renovation.

“It looked like a motor hotel in Hyannis,” said David McCue, 65, the founder of McCue Corp., a safety equipment manufacturer. (Janet McCue, now 60, who worked in the fashion industry, is retired.)

Initially, David McCue rejected the offer, as the couple had already renovated five homes and had no interest in doing this one publicly. “I can’t imagine doing this on TV,” he remembers thinking. “I wouldn’t want a camera in my face.”

Then a producer paid them a visit. “He was utterly charming, and our ‘no’ went to ‘maybe,’ ” David McCue said. The next day, the McCues received a delivery: a box of videotapes of past episodes, with a note that said “homework.”

Soon after, the McCues met with Morash and Silva, and were finally persuaded. “Russ was known as awfully crotchety. But I didn’t mind; I grew up in England with crotchety people,” David McCue said. “I thought he was great and authentic and real and didn’t mince words.”

And so the McCues agreed to chronicle their $2.1 million renovation on air, restoring the house to its 19th-century grandeur, rebuilding porches and dormers, adding a music room, an art studio, an open kitchen and two-story windows to the foyer.

The 7,100-square-foot house is now on the market for $9.75 million. One of the selling points: It was rebuilt by Silva of “This Old House.”

Like the other homes featured on the show, the McCue house became a character in its own right, with a story that bound its history to its future. “The house is, in many ways, the most important character on the show,” Vila said.

And if it’s got enough character, it makes for good television.

While filming a 40th anniversary special for “This Old House” recently, Bob Vila, the show’s original host, stopped to consider why, after all these years, people still can’t seem to get enough of home improvement shows.

'This old house' turns 40

The dining room felt like an awkward, disjointed extension of the living room, not quite private enough to be its own space, but not fully integrated, either. And with the living room missing a key wall, figuring out how to logically furnish it was no easy feat.

And so, about a month ago, I hired a carpenter to restore part of the wall. By partially closing off the space, I aimed to create a separate dining area with its own mood, and to restore the original dimensions of the living room.

When I told the carpenter what I wanted, he stared at me blankly, like he’d heard me wrong. “But people like the walls open,” he said.

In the weeks before the work was done, I avoided telling friends, worried that they, too, might think I was nuts. The few I did tell mostly seemed confused. In the age of open-concept design, who builds a wall?

The trend toward an open-concept floor plan — where few, if any, walls separate the spaces where we eat from those where we lounge — has become so commonplace it’s hard to imagine an alternative.

The idea of togetherness drives the design, creating a setup where a parent can simultaneously make an omelet and watch the children play in the living room because, apparently, no one wants to be alone. Or guests can move freely from the giant kitchen island to the living room sofa, unencumbered by obstacles like doorways. The design style has become the liturgy of home-improvement shows, with HGTV stars like Joanna Gaines catapulting to fame largely because of her uncanny ability to transform rundown farmhouses into loftlike showrooms.

In the city, that ethos translates easily because space is tight and lofts are a genuine home style. Remove the walls in a galley kitchen and suddenly a tiny cooking space can feel larger and lighter. With an island instead of a wall, you might actually have a place to sit. New developments are invariably designed with open floor plans, a trend that’s reinforced by ever-shrinking apartments. Without any walls, a prospective tenant might not realize how small the space really is.

Developers claim the tenants like it. “Many new renters and buyers are embracing the open concept,” said Chris Schmidt, a senior vice president for Related Companies who oversees the developer’s rental portfolio. “It allows, certainly, the flexibility for entertaining and cooking.”

Schmidt pointed to millennials in particular as a “generation who crave that social interaction,” and so “are going to crave that open concept versus walling everything off.”

Owners of older apartments also see the potential in a sledgehammer, with an enthusiasm fueled not only by HGTV, but by home-improvement design websites like Houzz, which features endless images of Instagram-ready open living spaces.

“People walk into every space, regardless of the condition, and want to make an adjustment,” said Sydney Blumstein, an associate broker with Corcoran. People “feel like they must personalize a space to make it theirs, and that goes beyond home décor.”

And what better way to personalize than to make yours look like everyone else’s?

The fixation with openness extends to the suburbs, where buyers eagerly take down walls in the kitchen and living room, and widen doorways. “People are definitely looking at the floor plans,” said Judith Daniels, a sales associate with Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty, who works frequently with first-time buyers moving from the city to Summit, Short Hills, Maplewood and South Orange — New Jersey towns with large, colonial homes that weren’t originally designed to look like lofts. “They’re looking for openness that’s already there or the ability to do it, just by opening the wall.”

But do we really need so much togetherness? That fabulous dinner party where guests wander endlessly from the kitchen to the living room feels far less glamorous with everyone staring at a sink full of dirty pots, or smelling the burned soufflé in the oven. Sure, the idea of watching your children play while you make dinner sounds great, but only until you’re trying to listen to Terry Gross on NPR while an episode of “Peppa Pig” blasts from the other side of what used to be a wall.

Then, of course, there are all those Houzz pictures. None of them show what it’s like when you haven’t tidied up in a week and you’re left staring at the living room clutter while you eat breakfast. With no walls, there’s nowhere to hide.

“It went so far about opening everything up,” said Jade Joyner, the chief creative officer of Metal + Petal, an interior design firm in Athens, Georgia. “There’s something nice about privacy and having your own space.” In the last year, she’s noticed the beginnings of a pushback against the doctrine of openness. Clients have been asking for media rooms, libraries and playrooms set off from the main living area. A quiet den means you can come home from work and not immediately join the family, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “It’s been indoctrinated that walls are bad, but they’re not,” Joyner said.

A home designed for entertaining does not necessarily take into account that most of the time you’re not entertaining. Mostly, you’re just living there, trying to read a book while your son practices the piano.

It also can be difficult to decorate an endless expanse of space. “My biggest issue with an open floor plan is lack of wall space. Where do you hang things?” said Abbe Fenimore, a Dallas-based interior designer who otherwise embraces open concept.

After the carpenter rebuilt my wall, I painted the dining room a deep teal, and the living room white. The two spaces, which once felt like they competed with each other for attention, now seem more defined. If the children’s homework is spread out on the dining table, I don’t have to look at it from the sofa anymore and wonder when it will get finished.

As for my friends, when I had a few of them over for dinner to celebrate the redecorated space, no one even noticed the wall. It was like it had always been there.

At some point, the previous owners of my house decided to take down the wall separating the living room from the dining room, creating an open space that, in theory, was a good idea. But in reality, it seemed to me, it didn’t make any sense.

I'm over open-concept design

<h1>She knew little about houses and even less about the local tradesmen in the area. Most of them wanted nothing to do with her little house with no square angles and oddities like closets without doors. </h1>

They would come to her property, which was set on 2 acres of what was once a tobacco farm, assess the work and never return.

“If a contractor showed up at my door, I groveled,” Ruh, 68, said. “Whatever it takes, I don’t need estimates, please do some work.”

But few would. Problems piled up. The roof started to leak. An outside spigot burst, flooding her garden. She found one handyman who was so rude and unreliable that a friend who encountered him at the house urged Ruh to fire him. But what other option did she have?

A home needs its support crew — tradesmen like plumbers, electricians, handymen and gutter cleaners willing to show up in an emergency, but also reliable enough to do the regular maintenance needed to prevent a disaster. Without a roster of go-to professionals, an inexperienced homeowner can feel adrift, wondering if that clogged tub will ever drain again.

Three years ago, after years of searching, Ruh finally found the help she needed. Through a referral, she was introduced to a handyman who lived in the neighborhood. He showed up. He did the work well. He repaired the bathroom that had been damaged by the leaky roof. He installed flooring, built doors for those crooked closets and even closed off the outdoor spigot so it wouldn’t burst again. Now, she draws up lists of tasks, and when it grows long, he stops by and does the work. Ruh, who lives alone with her four dogs, refers to him as her “house husband.”

“I was in a state of constant panic for the first few years I was here because I didn’t know anybody, I had no idea how to do anything,” Ruh, a retired legal secretary, said. Now, “I’m so much more relaxed.”

Finding reliable and seasoned professionals takes time, and also means keeping in touch with the ones you have so that your name lands at the top of their list when your furnace fails on a holiday weekend because, face it, things invariably go awry after business hours.

“We’re finding that, more and more, people are putting together a go-team, effectively a task-management network,” said Stacy Brown-Philpot, chief executive of TaskRabbit, a search platform for handymen. But finding the right people is not easy. “There is a lot of stress. It’s hard to know who to trust,” she said.

Here are some tips for building your crew:

— The Top of the List

A good plumber should top any homeowner’s list of go-to contractors. Water accounts for 45 percent of damage to homes, according to Chubb, a property and casualty insurance company, with plumbing failures cited as the top cause of non-weather related water losses. “Water is your house’s worst enemy,” said Angie Hicks, a co-founder of Angie’s List. “So having a plumber is imperative.”

Plumbers have different specialties, with some focusing on larger remodeling projects and others handling the everyday problems with water heaters, boilers, sump pumps and pipes. Most plumbers charge by the hour — usually between $45 and $200 — for ordinary tasks, according to HomeAdvisor.

Ask potential hires what they charge for emergency calls and how quickly they can respond on nights and weekends, because at some point you’re going to need one to come fast.

— Where to Look and What to Ask

Friends and neighbors can be a valuable resource, particularly ones who have owned their homes for a long time. Connect with a wider network of neighbors through social media groups like Facebook and NextDoor. Ask pointed questions about how quickly the workers respond to calls, how well they clean up after they’re done and how they respond to mishaps.

Real estate brokers often have a long roster of tradespeople, so ask yours. The workers you hire can refer you to other professionals, too. If an electrician installs some recessed lights in your living room, for example, he may be able to suggest a painter to repair any damage done to the walls or ceiling.

And websites like Angie’s List and TaskRabbit can match you with professionals. Read the reviews carefully, looking to see if the person you’re considering has done similar work to what you need and what past users thought of it. Check the Better Business Bureau for ratings and complaints.

— Interview Potential Hires

Ask potential hires for references, proof of license and liability insurance. Find out how long the company has been in business, and if it offers warranties for the work. Get a sense of their personality and working style, as you want to develop a comfortable rapport with anyone who will be coming into your home.

Different contractors have different skill sets. While one handyman might be able to lay a floor and paint a room with skill, another may specialize in tasks like assembling furniture and hanging a flat screen television. Ask what types of jobs they do regularly and for how long they’ve been working. For larger jobs, ask for photographs of past similar work and references.

“You want a handyman who is incredibly honest about what they do and what they don’t do,” Hicks said.

You may end up with a roster of tradesmen with varying skills. Program the names into your phone, or tack a sheet to the refrigerator so you can easily find them again. TaskRabbit now offers users an online to-do list to track upcoming projects and connect you with workers who can do the job.

— Start Looking When Nothing Is Broken

To keep your trusted crew close, find small, manageable projects around the house. Use those jobs as opportunities to try out potential workers and remind the favorite ones that you’re still around. For example, establish a regular maintenance routine with the same gutter cleaner every season, so if an ice dam forms in the middle of winter, you know they’ll come out in the snow to help.

For Georgette Izen, who lives in a two-bedroom apartment in the three-family house she owns in Oxford, Georgia, her long list of trusted workers became a lifeline during Hurricane Irma in 2017.

Izen, 68, who was at her son’s wedding in New York when the storm struck, received a panicked call from her tenant: A surge protector caught fire when too much electricity coursed through the house, causing a carpet to catch fire. The tenant extinguished the flames, but an electrician was needed immediately. Then the power went out, causing the sump pump to fail. And debris littered the yard.

From afar, Izen mobilized her plumber, electrician and landscaper, all of whom rushed to her house to help. The damages totaled about $4,000. Izen estimated that if it hadn’t been for the quick response, the disaster would have cost her at least $20,000, and substantially more if there had been a serious fire. She credited the years she spent giving her team her repeat business and cultivating good relationships for their fast response.

“They remember me and they come when I ask them to,” she said. “And that’s important.”

Filling the Roster of Your House-Repair Team

After she retired and left Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Dorothy Ruh bought an old farmhouse in rural Kentucky in 2010.

Filling the roster of your house-repair team

<h1>If you’ve already done the hard work of sorting through your belongings and culling what you do not need, great work!</h1>

If you want to give your home an organizational makeover, but aren’t sure how to start, consider signing up for our Tidy Home Challenge, which will walk you through each room of your home and give step-by-step instructions on how to neaten any space. (You will need to be an NYTimes.com subscriber to sign up.)

If you already have bags of stuff that you do not want in your house any more, don’t succumb to the urge to take all the junk to the dump or leave it on the curb. Many items can be sold, donated or recycled, giving them another life that will be better for the environment and perhaps your pocketbook, too. Below are some options for how to dispense with the excess.

Only attempt to sell items — clothes, books, electronics, accessories, jewelry and toys — that are in good to excellent condition. Designer brands and jewels may fetch a tidy sum. But even lesser items might deliver you some pocket change.

Option 1: Garage Sale

Hold a stoop or yard sale. If you decide to go this route, brace yourself for the work ahead. Yard sales take planning and require at least a full day of your time. But they can also be fun, social and a good way to make money on items you might not otherwise sell. Here’s how to do it:

— Get permits from your city or town, if needed.

— Visit other yard sales in the area to get a sense of local pricing.

— Post signs around the neighborhood and on any local social media groups like Facebook or Nextdoor, if permitted.

— Price all the items with stickers, and group like items together. Be reasonable in your pricing, as people come looking for bargains. Remember, the goal is to get rid of this stuff.

— Make sure you have plenty of small bills, a calculator and a comfortable chair.

Plan to donate anything left over at the end of your yard sale, unless you want to take it to the next level...

There are plenty of options for hosting a virtual stoop sale. Here are some options for where to try to sell your stuff online.

— ThredUP for basic wardrobe items.

— TheRealReal, Vestiaire Collective or LePrix (formerly SnobSwap) for designer clothes.

Children’s apparel and toys

— Powells Books and Amazon Trade-In for books.

China, flatware and dishes

Everything and anything

Tips for selling online

Be prepared to create a profile, manage the sale and eventually ship the items to buyers. (Facebook Marketplace, for example, allows buyers to find items close to their home, so you may be able to avoid the shipping hassle.)

If you’re like a lot of the people watching the new Netflix show, “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo,” you have already looked around your home for things you want to get rid of.

Ronda Kaysen

Articles written by the author

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