All About Bob: Bob Vila Biography

Bob Vila Home Improvement History

Online and on the job site, home improvement pro Bob Vila helps homeowners build their dreams.

This year, Bob Vila - celebrates his 27th year on television.

After 27 successful years as an on-air personality, Bob Vila - one of the most beloved television personalities and the country's best-known authority on home improvement - is still going strong. His eponymous half-hour home improvement series, "Bob Vila", is syndicated nationally by Kingworld to nearly 200 stations reaching over 1 millions households every week while past season programming from "Bob Vila's Home Again", which aired from 1990 to 2005, can be seen daily on the DIY Network.

Bob kicked off this season of "Bob Vila" with a return to storm-threatened Florida and the region's need for quick-build, strong, affordable housing. In response to the demand for affordable housing, steel shipping containers are being converted into houses that go up fast and can stand up to a storm. Bob participates in a project with St. Petersburg Neighborhood Housing Services and Tampa Armature Works to use these ISBU's (intermodal steel building units) to support recycling the hundreds of thousands of abandoned shipping containers that choke the nation's ports by turning them into affordable yet attractive housing-a win-win for communities and homeowners. These prefabricated steel units are built in accordance with FLASH (Federal Alliance for Safe Homes) Blueprint for Safety guidelines to resist high winds, impact damage, and termites, which makes them an ideal choice for coastal and storm-threatened communities. Last season Bob teamed up with FLASH, the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, to help rebuild a hurricane-demolished home in Punta Gorda, Florida. In response to the disaster Bob and FLASH put together a plan using a newly updated solid-pour concrete wall system, super-engineered roof truss systems, impact-resistant windows, and integrated connective hardware which, coupled with scientifically researched construction techniques and standards, produced a true storm-ready house.

After representing the Craftsman Tool brand for many years Bob is now making his own! The Bob Vila brand of home improvement tools was launched last October exclusively on Home Shopping Network television and over the internet. The line includes basic hand tools and cordless power tools and a number of project specific tool kits which include video "how to" instruction on a variety of home improvement topics such as basic plumbing jobs and picture hanging kits. The brand is expanding with a big roll-out into mass market retail stores in the fourth quarter of 2007.

In 1999, Bob hosted his first-ever original weekly cable series, "Restore America with Bob Vila" on Home & Garden Television (HGTV). In "Restore America," Vila brought viewers on a state-by-state tour of some of the country's most beautifully restored historic buildings, neighborhoods and gardens. The series celebrated the people and communities working to reclaim their neighborhoods and preserve America's culture, heritage and history. In the past, Bob has been a regular contributor on NBC's "Today Show," CBS News' "This Morning" and has produced his own series of specials for A&E, "Bob Vila's Guide to Historic Homes," taking fans to some of the most spectacular historic homes in the US, Italy, England, and Ireland.

Bob's reach extends beyond television. His award-winning Web site, bobvila.com, aims to assist people at every stage of the building and remodeling process and provides homeowners with end-to-end solutions for transforming their houses into dream homes. Among the newly-launched features are "MyProjects" where users can communicate with one another about their own home improvement projects through the sharing of ideas, photos and videos, a growing library of downloadable step-by-step video how-to’s, as well as two new blogs: "On The Level" is written by BobVila.com correspondents reporting on the latest trends in home improvement, and "FLASH Focus" which spotlights the newest ideas on storm-ready design from the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes (FLASH.) The site ranks as one of the top home improvement sites on the Web. Visitors to the site can also view streaming video clips from Bob's 17 years of informative and entertaining television programming. Bob is the author of eleven books, including the five-volume Bob Vila's Guide to Historic Homes of America, and his latest, Bob Vila's Complete Guide to Remodeling Your Home.

A Miami native, Bob graduated from The University of Florida School of Journalism. He spent time in the Peace Corps and subsequently worked and traveled in Europe for two years. Upon his return to the U.S., he settled in Boston, where he studied at the Boston Architectural Center and established his own residential remodeling and design business. It was Bob's restoration of a Victorian Italianate house in Newton Center, MA that caught the attention of a Boston Globe reporter, who wrote a feature on the house. This article sparked the interest of a producer at WGBH, who soon after produced a pilot program on home renovation using Vila and the Newton Center home as the focal point, which led to a TV series entitled "This Old House." In 1989, after ten years as host of the program, Vila left WGBH and founded BVTV Inc., the television production company which produces "Bob Vila's Home Again."

Bob's wife Diana Barrett, formerly a professor at the Harvard Business School, is currently involved in a number of important philanthropic endeavors. These include The Fledgling Fund, a foundation dedicated to financially supporting young filmmakers and select film projects and Summer Search, a national organization that provides a lasting support network to low income high school students. Bob also remains dedicated to several charitable organizations including Habitat for Humanity, The Hemingway Preservation Foundation and the Vila Foundation.

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For information regarding the successful resolution of the CAN-SPAM lawsuit filed by Hypertouch against BlueStream and BobVila.com click here.

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