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Couch Potato Corner: Our Favorite TV Shows
Your home as a castleCall us purists, but we at CornerHardware.com find TV shows on home improvement a fairly pale version of the real thing. (The smell of sawdust! The roar of power tools!) But we do turn to PBS and Home and Garden Television (HGTV), the 24-hour-a-day cable network, for inspiration and entertainment. Both networks host some fairly fetching remodels, and the new tools are always an inspiration. Here are some of our favorite shows; please let us know if we missed yours.

Hometime
"Hometime" co-hosts Dean Johnson and Robin Hartl make you want to pick up a hammer and start framing. They're so chipper. When they're not extolling cabinet finishes or sinks in a remodeled bathroom, they're laying brick driveways. OK, so these aren't exactly the kinds of fixes you can do in an evening after work. But Johnson and Hartl are wonderful missionaries of how-to, and besides, it's always nice watching other people working when you're in the mood not-to.
This Old House
Another show that emphasizes big jobs—the first and best-known home improvement program—is PBS's "This Old House" (TOH). TOH's projects tend to be on the grand side, but its chronicles of historic home renovations fascinate those of us in newer digs. It's far from an instructional guide for do-it-yourselfers: Norm Abram and Steve Thomas, the show's current stars, spend most of their time visiting construction sites and kibbitzing with homeowners and architects rather than pouring cement and pounding nails. (Norm, a master carpenter, is no stranger to a chopsaw. We just wish he had a more hands-on role in renovations, the way he used to in the old days.) "This Old House" may not be the ultimate step-by-step reference, but some of the details of those old places—the crown molding!—are a delight.

This Old House Classics
For kicks, we also like to watch "This Old House Classics" on HGTV, where a young Bob Vila hosts the early episodes of this 21-year-old series. Like the current series on PBS, "TOH Classics" focuses on ambitious restorations of historic buildings. These shows are fun to watch because Bob and Norm used to get up-close and specific with contractors. Besides, we grew up with those guys, and it's a little like looking at old family photos. Not that we're getting any heavier or grayer.

True, these shows—and home improvement programming in general—tend to focus on high-end projects that you might not attempt on your own. And in a half-hour show, you can't show all the steps in a complex process. But they're great idea-generators that help you think about better ways to remodel or build. They give you a taste of how it's done. Sounds like great entertainment to us.
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