I'm not exactly what one would call a handyman. Sure, I can do minor repairs on things, but by and large I have no knowledge or interest in anything like construction or home improvement.

Which is why it's odd I've become a fan of a Canadian show on HGTV called "Holmes Inspection"

Basic storyline is this.

1) Uber-craftsman and inspector Mike Holmes shows up at a house. Basically this is the guy that, if he was put in charge of building the Death Star, Emperor Palpatine would be reduced to a quivering mass while Mike Holmes explains all the design flaws in the design.

2) He meets the home owners, who explain the reasons why they had an el-cheapo home inspection, or no inspection at all when they bought their house. Usually a few months afterwards, they notice the green glowing ooze down the walls, and the fact that the builders used compressed oatmeal for structural materials.

3) Mike Holmes patiently explains why This Was A Very Stupid Idea on the part of the home owners. Rather than telling them exactly why they have pencil shavings for brains, he says he'll make it right, usually in tones that makes the house try and spontaneously repair itself out of sheer terror.

4) Mike Holmes then goes though the house, locating all the problems the owners cited and finding fresh new ones. By the time he's done, you realize the house has the structural integrity of wet cardboard, and is slightly above Love Canal in toxicity. He then kicks them out of the house, more than likely to some level 4 quarantine facility for decontamination

5) At some point in the inspection, some key portions of the house will be found to be 110% mold. Indeed, one comes to the conclusion that the portion of the house in question was built out of mold.

6) Rather than tell the owners that he'll just set fire to the place and tell the insurance company it was an "electrical fault", Mike Holmes then summons the Legion of Super Builders, a team of super-powered tradespeople to come though the house and commit acts of mass destruction and renovation upon it.

7) The Legion of Super Builders proceed to gut the basement, tear up the floors, punch though the ceiling, rip out the plumbing, dig around the house, and generally do everything short of total demolishing.

8) Meanwhile, a seperate team of crack mold extermination experts come in. Recruited from an international selection of crack former SEALS, SAS, and SPETSNAZ troops, they go in with orders to take out the mold by any means necessary.

9) New foundations are poured, roofs are put in, decks rebuilt, electrical and plumbing systems rewired. Arcane terms like "vapor barriers" and "weeping tile" are conjured out of thin air, sounding more like something from an AD&D spellbook than actual building terms. Any structural falls, like missing load-bearing walls, cracked joists, and insufficient bracing, are found, commented upon, and repaired, This is usually done with a tone of voice and manner suggesting there's a few foundations around the Toronto area, with the bodies of those contractors who were found wanting, stuffed underneath.

10) Blue mold-resistant wood and drywall, looking like it was formed from the crushed bodies of millions of smurfs, is brought in and used for framing and walls. It has one purpose - death to all mold. It is merciless. It is pitiless. Any errant spore that touches this stuff will meet with a horrible, painful death.

11) The areas are repainted, reroofed, and restored to a condition and appearance that wouldn't be out of place on the International Space Station.

12) The now-decontaminated owners are then returned to Starbase Single-Family, formerly the deathtrap they barely survived. They blink in stunned disbelief at the high-tech, energy-saving enclosure that they now reside in.

13) The owners take a solemn oath upon the bones of Mike Holmes' ancestors that they will never never never never ever even think about buying another home without finding some uber-inspector approved by Mike Holmes and the Legion of Super Builders.

14) The show ends with the owners showing thanks and tributes upon Holmes and his team for rescuing them from the toxic oatmeal that was their home.

It's not the kind of show I usually like, but for some reason I do.

LOVE your description. Spot on.

I liked the show too, for the first year or so I watched it. Then it became repetitious. Sort of like "House". Both shows have to kill the patient before they can rebuild them to be perfect. Both make me leery about having any major work done.

I did like the couple that went up to their attic to find a foot of snow lying on top of the rafters.

Perfect summary of Holmes.

I will say that, after watching a few of the shows, I'm scared to death to ever buy another house.

Now I'm scared to keep living in my house.

I'm scared to keep living in the house we own.

I'm scared to even watch a house get built in the first place...

When W2 and I bought our first house, we made a list and went to the local Home Depot to fix a few things. Oh. my. stars. and. garters! It was like a Halloween House of Horrors! An entire aisle of Things That Can Go Wrong With Plumbing!!! Creatures that need to be killed! Things renters never even knew existed could blow up and cause thousands of dollars of damage! AIEEEEE! PAINT was a nightmare. What brand, kind, color, gloss, room, additives. 10 different kinds of ROLLERS. Half an aisle of brushes. Gadgets and gizmos. Buckets and spackle and grout, Oh My. And what about primer? Or Killz? Textures? Faux finishes? Glazes? I JUST WANTED TO PAINT THE BEDROOM!!!

We ran out of there in a semi-panic. Really. I'm sweating just thinking about it. Went up the street to the nice city Ace Hardware, with way fewer choices. The nice old guy there set us straight. He may have been a ghost, now that I think about it...

So now W2 thinks we rent. With a really really big security deposit.

What you have to keep in mind is they probably have 300 possible homes submitted to them and pick the absolute worsts. In addition, Holmes is a fucking drama queen who exaggerates everything. Here are some examples. You can almost guarantee in a more than 10 year old house that if you took out the tile on the tub surround you would find a little mold back there, no matter how clean or dry you keep the thing. You can almost guarantee if you take out the toilet there's been some leakage. If there's a leaky window, there will be mold in the insulation around it. Would it be better not to have it? Sure. Does it all rise to the level of Holmes indignant rage? No. The other thing you will almost always find if there's electrical work that's been done without a permit is something that's hot that shouldn't be. Notice how he always finds hot wires to nowhere. It's because he sees where there's been a renovation/addition, does his homework and learns there's no occupancy permit for it and opens the wall to look for what is almost certainly there. Holmes is mostly playing the odds of finding the not-that-unusual and then glitzing it up with his outrage.

If you really dig the guy, I'm sorry to piss on your pop tart, but what he does is mostly razzle dazzle.

I had to have a plumber today. When clearing out the ex's stuff to prepare for realist moving in (its such a faux pas to commingle the last with the new) I discovered that the basement ceiling had a dime sized hole in it. Oops. This house has more water trouble. Don't ask about the xmas eve that the pipe from outdoors blew up bringing massive water in and causing a huge sinkhole in my front lawn. Fortunately all is fixed and weeny learned some plumbing skills as she assisted the plumber.

Pat is teetering on the brink of total snark, but with admiration. He's nailed the adulation part, for sure.

Im a big fan of some of the new shows. I know they exist to encourage us to be dissatisfied with our lot and buy more stuff, to spend spend spend more money money money and they're all scripted to death -for example, House Hunters films it only after they've purchased the house. It's more a recreation than reality, but I still love it. Also, Property Brothers and KitchenCousins.

I'm studying to take the realtor's exam. I consider them a kind of classroom.

We decided to go the other route -- to build our house. Mrs. Skeptic had at least grown up living in houses; I, except for very brief periods, never lived anywhere but in NYC apartments. We had never owned land. We knew absolutely nothing. And this wasn't that long ago -- we were pretty sure that it would be not only our first house but also our last.

Our architect was competent enough, but had recently retired from a career in municipal architecture, designing things like school buildings. Residential work was not his strong point.

Early in the process, he took us to meet another client, a lovely couple with a nice hilltop house in Bar Harbor. He had only done some renovations for them, but he wanted us to meet them as a sort of reference on his work.

The gentleman told me that he was generally pleased with the design work, but that some of the fine details were not to his liking. He said to me, you know, you don't have to choose everything yourself, but if you don't make the decisions, someone else is going to make them for you. I got the message.

So, we plunged into the unknown. For a week we read all the plumbing catalogs and made ourselves experts on the various types of sinks and toilets available (each with alternate seats, our choice!). Then we made known our choices and forget about toilets, becoming experts on kitchen cabinets. Then appliances. Then flooring -- types of hardwood, carpeting, ceramic tiles. We personally chose every doorknob, every drawer pull, every light fixture. We thought it would never end.

But it did, and the house got built. We're generally very pleased with it, though there are some choices we wish we had made differently. Now the house is about 15 years old, and the trick is to keep it from deteriorating!

99.98% of all mold is harmless.

It will probably take awhile for that wisdom to reach Canada.

(Hektor -- I'm not slamming you, just Mr. Holmes.)

And 99.98% of all homes have mold. Having dealt with scores of home inspectors over the years, I don't think he's as alarmist as most of the guys in the profession.
You should have seen the guy who did the inspection on my old home. I allegedly had asbestos insulation and higher than normal radon. Cost me several thousand to remediate problems with a 100-yr-old house. Buyer wanted more repairs. I told him no. It was an old house and would always need work. He could deal with it.

Yep! I usually joke about "Okay, what's this week's train wreck gonna look like??"

The show amuses me, but I suspect it's best not to take it seriously.

I have a spouse allergic to many of the molds out there. And we live in the Pacific Northwet.

As a result, we try pretty hard to keep the molds in our area down to a dull roar.

That's right. I basically said that above.

Any home inspector who even approaches Holmes level of alarm, especially when he represents a buyer, is simply trying to help that buyer get thousands of dollars in free home improvements. He knows he's trying to rip you off and if the buyer isn't a first-time buyer, he knows the deal too.

We tend to lean towards the mold-alarmist side down here. Between our high humidity and experience with flooding/hurricane stuff, we take it pretty seriously. (Doesn't everyone buy Clorox 5 gallons at the time?)

Shame is most home owners are held hostage by the inspectors, especially the VA/FHA ones, in a depressed market. VA and sometimes FHA won't guarantee the loan on a home that doesn't pass inspection. You have to fix the problem for them. You can't offer credit.

Sugar that mold issue holds especially true for homes in your area that have been finished with stucco or EIFS . The stucco could have been defective or improperly installed or not diligently maintained. Moisture seeps in around the door and windows frames and the mold colonizes. By time a problem is discovered, part of the framing may have been mulched, structurally compromising the house. Some relocation companies and corporations will not buy a transferee's home if it has EIFS on the exterior.

I was very sick two years ago when we moved into our rental. There was mold in the ceiling of the porch outside our bedroom window. I got pneumonia, exacerbated by the mold. The same day I told my landlord about it, he had a guy out here fixing it.

I didn't know I was so sensitive to it.

I bought a special air purifying system for my house that takes care of it. I too have problems with it.