Holmes keeps it all in the family
Celebrity contractor brings kids into mix to help homeowners on new TV show
Squirrels are driving Patricia and Rod nuts. The critters have chewed into their rotting roof and are terrorizing their daughter Kiana through her bedroom walls. Here’s where new series Holmes 911 begins. Celebrity contractor Mike Holmes and two of his children race to the rescue to banish the furry intruders and renovate the old home known around the family’s neighbourhood as “the barn.”
More than ever, the latest renovation show from Holmes is a family affair. Holmes’s son Mike Jr. and daughter Sherry are officially brought into the mix to help homeowners who’ve been down on their luck.
“We just take over and change their world,” Mike Sr. said. “They know we’re going to make it right.” In the first couple of episodes, Patricia and Rod live in a self-described “fixer-upper” but are overwhelmed by costly medical bills for their son. The second family featured in the opening episode, who recently lost their daughter to brain cancer, were in insurance limbo for a year after a dishwasher leak, spawning a chain of further mishaps with the home.
“We’d like to help as many people as possible,” says Mike Jr. “If we have to choose, we’re going to choose the people who need it the most. People who have struggled more.”
Of course the show features construction, says Mike Jr., referring to his father’s home renovation empire that started with Holmes on Homes in 2001. This time the focus is the family helping other families, and the journey of coming together to help where their talents are needed most.
“It has my personal life in it more so than any of the other shows have,” said Sherry, who’s visibly pregnant in the first few episodes. “I usually never do any of that.”
Throughout the years of doing the shows, this is one of the better beginning-to-end formulas, says Mike Sr. “It is very different than any of the other shows that we’ve done.”
But working with family is not always easy. Though the three of them acknowledge that they always have the same aims with a project, their approaches can be very different. “We disagree …” Sherry begins. “Almost on the daily,” her brother overlaps. “There’s different opinions on design, different opinions in taste, different opinions on layout. Different opinions on how we get to that end goal.”
Asked if dad gets the final say when it comes to those decisions, Mike Jr. grants that his father is the president of The Holmes Group and ultimately the boss.
“I will be firm on structure and the way we need to do things,” says Mike Sr. “What we try to do in the long run is come to a happy agreement.”
The other focus for the show is on educating homeowners and viewers about the ins and outs of their houses. When layers of rooms are peeled away, buried potential hazards are exposed and the shoddy work of previous contractors is revealed.
“We want to show them what’s wrong, what could have gone
We want to show them what’s wrong, what could have gone wrong in their home and educate them.
wrong in their home and educate them on basically the house that they’re living in and why we’re renovating it a certain way,” Mike Jr. said.
Both Mike Jr. and Sherry speak passionately about the need for the stigma to end around the skilled trades. They stress that it’s a viable, lucrative career and the school system doesn’t promote it adequately. Sherry points out fewer than four per cent of skilled trades workers in Canada are women.
“I look at it as, we’re artists,” says Mike Jr. “We take a thought, we take a piece of paper, we take a drawing and we bring that to life.”
When asked if any plans exist to take over for their father, both Sherry and Mike Jr. know the answer right away. “He’ll never retire,” Mike Jr. says. “He’ll step back, but he’ll never retire.”
Sherry agrees. “I don’t think he can.”