It was 20, maybe even 30 years ago, that Norm Abram was the headline guest for a home renovation weekend at the Rochester Riverside Convention Center. As he walked into the room, the audience broke out into a chant:
“Norm! Norm! NORM! NORM!”
Abram doesn’t remember that exact moment. But yes, he concedes, in his soften-spoken manner, that was what he’d become. A cult figure of public broadcasting television. Perhaps the biggest celebrity carpenter since Joseph. Abram says he’s piled up more frequent flyer miles than he can ever use.
Now he’s retiring after 43 years of renovating houses, building more furniture than he can remember, and brushing the sawdust from his familiar plaid shirts. But not before he gets his own biographical documentary, complete with highlights from his years with “This Old House” and “The New Yankee Workshop.” The hour-long “The House That Norm Built” premieres 9 p.m. Monday on WXXI-TV, with an encore at 5 p.m. on Oct. 8.
“After forty-plus years now,” he says, talking by phone from his home in Carlisle, Massachusetts, “I kind of look back and say, ‘Wow, what just happened?’”
It didn’t happen off a blueprint. It just happened. Abram was a contractor who landed a job building a small workshop in television producer Russell Morash’s back yard. Morash had produced Julia Child’s PBS show “The French Chef,” and in Abram’s handiwork he saw the spark of another hands-on show.
Morash had a television crew film a 13-episode series of Abram and host Bob Vila renovating a Victorian home in Dorchester, a suburb of Boston. Unexpectedly, Morash now had a hit on his hands. A hit, in that low-key PBS sort of way. Over the next decade, “This Old House” continued to build a cult following, with a little intrigue, even. Abram and Vila argued, then Vila was reportedly fired from the show over his accumulation of personal sponsorships that conflicted with the sponsors of the show.
Abram continued on. He still sounds like a guy who reacts with disbelief that anyone knows his name, let alone chants it. He recalls his first-ever public appearance, at a Chicago convention center.
“It was like a stadium inside the building, and there were hardly any people there,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Why did I go all the way out to Chicago for this?’ And by the time I walked in, it was packed. And that was my first sort of experience of knowing that – not knowing, originally – that ‘This Old House’ was that familiar. And people liked it.”
Liked it, to the point that a friend who was searching the internet for Abram minutiae discovered a photo of a guy whose arm had been inked with a tattoo of the celebrity carpenter.
Most of his admirers fall far short of stalker. Abram seems to maintain an easy relationship with people who share his intense relationship with wood.
“People always say, ‘Oh, we don’t want to bother you.’ I said, ‘Look, this is what I do, you’re not bothering me, I like what I do, and I’m glad that you like what we do as well,’” he says.
These shows aren’t scripted. They meet, discuss what knotty problem that episode will tackle, turn on the cameras and start cutting wood.
Renovating houses can be a puzzle, even for an experienced pair of hands like Abram’s. “You can look at them,” he says, “and until you start digging into them, you really don’t know.”
Abram didn’t venture into these problems alone. Other contractors, such as Tom Silva, lent a hand. “Tom and I loved to get stuff that was really a mess, and try to build it, and restore it in some way,” Abram says. Leaving an old house to die, until a machine comes along to knock it down, “is kind of sad to see.”
“The New Yankee Workshop” was a different machine, literally. All the tools Abram could dream of, mostly donated by tool-making companies. Including his favorite, a 36-inch sander that weighs 2,600 pounds. As Abram works with a lot of salvage lumber, the sander and what he calls “aggressive” sandpaper works well with old wood filled with nails.
For furniture making, Abram says your two essential tools are “a really good table saw, and a really good joiner.” Good for projects like the oddest one he says he ever tackled, a giant combo of bird house and feeder.
PBS shows such as “The French Chef” generally share the same kind of ethos: A disdain for dolling up the proceedings as a fancy production. On the old “Victory Garden,” the viewer could feel the late Peter Seabrook’s enthusiasm as he pointed out, in his elegant English accent, a particularly vivid amaryllis.
Oh, Abram has had his moments. He once stood on top of the Golden Gate Bridge. On another show, he says, they brought out an astronaut. But those moments were fleeting. Abram rues so many of today’s home-improvement shows that feel more like game shows.
“It becomes personalities rather than technique of building and renovating a house,” he says.
Abram will not disappear into the woodshed. The crew of “This Old House” has suggested he stop in for occasional cameos. He’s built his wife a pottery studio, he talks of building a small sailboat. And getting involved in woodworking at local schools. “It was a really sad thing to see it disappear over the years,” he says.
And then, there’s his own house.
“Because I spent a lot of time working for the show,” Abram says, “I have things to finish in the house I’m sitting in right now, that I built 30 years ago.”
