This Old House (1979)

Season 20: Episode 2

Our host opens the show with a visit to the Watertown Arsenal, now decommissioned and slated for redevelopment into office space. The highlight of the property is the Italianate Commander's Residence, a brick mansion being given to the town by the developer for use as a community center. At the project, the crew experiments with methods of stripping the exterior of its paint burden, while our host visits a renovated house in Cambridge, whose design was the reason Christian and Sue chose their designer/architect team, Sandra and Tony Fairbank. Richard Trethewey checks the state of the heating plant (grossly oversized) and the pipes (mostly OK), and Sandra Fairbank and Christian go over a proposed reordering of the house's tangled floorplan.