David: Veteran to the show and carpenter extraordinaire Norm Abram had never seen a house as bad as the one he faced this year in Roxbury, Mass. — well, almost.

“Norm and I walked around it early on, and he’s got all the institutional memory going back to the very first episode, and it was a toss-up of which was worse — the Roxbury project or one we did a few years ago in D.C.,” explains host Kevin O’Connor of the dilapidated house, which had been completely abandoned before it was purchased by the City of Boston and a local non-profit, Nuestra Comunidad Development Corp. The house was awarded to two deserving families.

O’Connor says that this difficult project is particularly potent during a time when the housing market is suffering.

“We thought the story could resonate with people in terms of what could possibly happen to a neighborhood when you have large-scale foreclosures,” he says, noting that as production of the show went on, the crew noticed more remodeling projects popping up in the neighborhood — a possible sign of light at the end of the tunnel.

LOW MAINTENANCE

The team at “This Old House” redesigned the Roxbury home with its low-income residents in mind, ensuring that the house would have minimal upkeep costs.

O’Connor: “You don’t want to burden them with a big behemoth that’s very expensive to operate or very expensive to maintain. We made sure that lots of the materials we used were very durable. The decks, stairs, the railings, lots of the trims that we used were a wood composite material that will not rot or lose color.”

Source: metro us.com