The premise of Holmes on Homes is that a homeowner has contracted some work to be done on their house and the job was either not finished or done improperly. The homeowner has exhausted all other options for getting the job done so they turn to Mike Holmes, who comes in, looks at the job with disgust, points out all the errors the contractor made, talks ugly about how the contractor took advantage of the homeowners, and ultimately saves the day by "making it right." The show makes it sound like every contractor out there is some kind of idiot or crook, but truthfully, sometimes it's the homeowners who are at fault, by hiring people they don't know or not investigating the contractor before hiring him. Then there are the homeowners who pay thousands and thousands of dollars before the job is finished (bad move), and then complain that they lost money.
Yes, there are some contractors who don't know what they're doing, yes, there are some who are out-and-out con men, and yes, there are some who hire sub-contractors who don't know what they're doing, but in defense of the honest contractors, retrofitting is not the easiest job in the world, so someone is bound to end up with a less-than perfect job because the contractor can only work within the limits that have been set for him.
Mike Holmes steps in, hands on hips, and says, "Tear it all out" and starts over again and everyone considers him a big hero, but if your contractor told you when you hired him that he was going to have to take down all your ceilings to do the wiring correctly and you'd have to move out of your house for two weeks and not be able to watch the job progress, you'd say, "No way, that's too expensive, I'm not doing it" so whose fault is it that the wiring ends up looking like a spider web and the ducts are installed at odd angles? If you'd let someone do the job right in the first place you wouldn't need to call Mike Holmes in to fix it later.
The real problem I have with the show is that after Mike tears everything out he changes the whole design of whatever it is he's working on. The homeowners want an exercise room and a bathroom in the basement but Mike doesn't like the way they laid it out, so he arbitrarily decides to make a bedroom too, and to put in this kind of lighting, and to move the bathroom over there instead. Or it's the kitchen that's messed up so instead of just fixing the plumbing he takes out all the cabinets, changes the layout, and picks out the colors and appliances that he likes or thinks they should have. The worst part is that he doesn't even let the homeowners into the workspace to approve any of his decisions! I don't like his attitude that he's better than them at deciding how they should live in their own home. He installs 20 recessed lights because he likes them and then he goes home, and the homeowners are left to pay the power bill. He uses spray-foam insulation everywhere, without considering that maybe someone might want to run another wire to a wall someday, which is next to impossible when you have no open space between the studs to run it through.
Just once I'd like to see Mike work within the same real-world confines as the original contractor, where he can't "tear it all out" and start over and do it the easy way; where he can only add new wiring to the existing wiring instead of rewiring the whole house; where he has to install a toilet where the drain already is without chopping up the concrete to run a new drainpipe; where he has to use the walls that are already there without being able to build new ones. That's when we'll be able to truly judge how good he is at "making it right."
