Puttin' the Hood in Neighborhood

This Old House is probably my least favorite show. However, they recently did a show in DC, so I figured I would watch it. They say you learn something new everyday, so when I actually learned two things, I exceeded my quota. Things I learned from watching This Old House DC:

1. Somebody finally wised up and told Bob Villa to get his shinebox and go shine shoes someplace else;
2. how to match old cement in bricks.
   

Regarding number 2: in case you didn't know, in reaaaallly old houses, like a lot of the ones in DC, there is probably not real cement holding together your bricks. Portland Cement, which they use nowadays wasn't invented until the 20s or 30s, so older houses have "cement" made from lime and sand. The difference between the cement they use nowadays and old stuff is like the difference between CrazyGlue and the "glue" you made with flour and water in kindergarten.

So anyway, that stuff wears out and it's a real bee-yotch to try to mix up something to repair it that will match the old stuff (unless you dig out a lot of it and re-point your whole house). So when they repaired an old townhouse in Shaw, a gentrifying neighborhood (that put the "hood" in neighborhood), they matched the old cement perfectly. How? They took a sample of the old cement and dipped it in Hydrocloric Acid. The acid disolves the lime, and leaves only the sand. Then you take the sand and find matching sand, add lime and voila, a perfect match.

This episode of This Old House did not suck because it was unlike the other episodes. What makes the other episodes unrealistic and unwatchable is the following:

1. I wouldn't trust Bob Villa to shine my shoes (my regular shoes or my ninja climbing shoes), so I don't buy him as the host of a home improvement show;
2. the houses on that show are usually in the million dollar plus range and the repairs are usually more than most people pay for an entire house. (I'm sorry, but I don't give a flying fig about renovating the governor's mansion, asshat. I wanna' know how the easiest way to insulate a really old house that had NO insulation whatsoever, so that I don't freeze to death or go broke paying the gas company) who has half a million for a renovation budget???;
3. Something about Norm Abrams that I can't put my finger on makes me not like him. He's got that Unabomber thing going on. (I got my eye on you, man, so don't even think about it!);
4. they tend to try to keep those places like museums. Who the hell still uses plaster? If you need to repair it, that's one thing, but if it's so bad that you had to remove it, why not just put up sheetrock like a normal person...or a person like me.
   

So anyway, some of the sucky elements of the usual episodes of This Old House were missing. It was a small 2BR rowhouse in Shaw. It was sold for $1 to a charitable organization that renovated it and turned it over to a needy family. Why you would give a home in one of the most expensive cities to live in to a really poor family is beyond me. The city keeps raising property assessments every year at an alarming rate, so I don't know how they are gonna afford it. Why not give a house in Beverly Hills to a poor family? I think they would be better off using the$250k they spent on renovations to buy 5 or 6 houses for poor people in someplace like Alabama.

I don't think I would use that Hydrocloric Acid trick myself (I don't mind endangering myself by doing electrical work, but something about Acid scares the crap out of me), but I thought I would throw it out there in case somebody finds it helpful.