Ask This Old House behind the scenes: an interview with showrunner Sarah Chasse

Fifteen years before HGTV, there was This Old House: the public television show starring Bob Vila that showed how a house was renovated. That took place over a season, not an episode.

Two years after Trading Spaces arrived on TLC in 2000, This Old House spun off a series all about homeowners asking its experts for help on a project: Ask This Old House, which returns today for its 25th season.

Ask This Old House’s showrunner is Sarah Chasse, who started working in This Old House office in 2014, and now is in charge of the spin-off’s entire production.

I interviewed her earlier this week, reaching out after reading a press release that said: “Under her leadership, the show has introduced a more contemporary filming style, visual identity and music while preserving the trusted expertise, craftsmanship and hands-on approach that have defined the series since its start.”

We talked about that and a lot more. It’s a fantastic conversation that ranges from algorithms to representation, and gets down into the nerdy details of filming how-to content in tight spaces.

For example, Ask This Old House not only pays for the work its team does in people’s homes, but stands behind it, too. This isn’t just for TV. Chasse tells homeowners, “We stand behind our work. So if there’s anything wrong with the project—if there ends up being a leak or if something cracks—jst call us. We will come and fix it. Because we’re not just here for the show. These are real tradespeople who stand behind the work and are proud of it, whether it’s on camera or not. So that’s a big source of pride for me for sure.”

While This Old House and Ask This Old House air on public television stations, the company and brand is now owned by Roku, after going through owners including Time Inc. and private equity. I was curious if those changes in ownership affected their work or the shows.

“Change is scary, but I’ve been delightfully surprised at how little has changed, especially with the two main shows,” Chasse told me. “We’re usually left to do our own thing. Our viewership is good, our sponsorship is good. There’s not too much to get in the way of. Honestly, the thing that’s changed the most is like who carries my health insurance.”

Roku, she said, “definitely seem more interested in partnering with us … We’re here. Let us know what support you want.” So far, that’s led to two spin-offs, including This First House, and two other shows, Idea House Mountain and Team Rubicon.

For more on those, how the show is filmed and cast, and much more, read on!

This interview has been condensed and edited to clean up human speech.

Andy Dehnart: To start with your start with the show: Did you come to it pretty much right out of college? If so, is this your only experience in television, or did you do more while you were in college?

Sarah Chasse: Pretty much! I did a couple of internships in college and freelance PA gigs that were like day-player things. But I saw an opening at This Old House the summer of 2014, which is when I graduated.

I was like, oh, it’d be awesome to work there. I put my resume into one of those online portals. I’m like, Yeah, this isn’t going anywhere.

And by some miracle, a recruiter called me and was like, I think you’d actually be a good fit for this. And I got the interview and I got the job at the front desk. I started in August of 2014. The role was office manager. We’ve since changed the role to office PA, because a lot of what that job is, is supporting the whole production team with mostly office tasks, but also going out into the field and doing some field PA stuff

I did that for about a year. I answered a lot of viewer messages and phone calls and stuff like that. I was starting to itch to do more stuff. At that time, our social media was still kind of in its early stages. So I did a lot of that because that was back when people were like, Well, you’re young. Can you do some posts? 

I’m like, Sure. I don’t have any training in this, but…

You understand Instagram! 

Yeah, exactly. The production coordinator happened to leave a year later. I applied and I got the job, and I got to do that for two years.

That job was really fun because it’s in-the-trenches. You’re on set every day: Ask This Old House, This Old House, custom content, whatever they need.

You’re the person getting making sure the gear is accounted for, getting it to set—and the person who’s the production assistant on set, making sure everyone has water, making sure everyone’s wearing safety gear, being up-to-date on general OSHA standards and stuff like that.

And shoot days are shoot days. They were long days and we traveled a lot too. It was a great time in my life to be doing that because I was not married, did not have children. I remember there was one year we did the series in Detroit. I would film in Detroit for the week, come home, empty my suitcase into the washing machine, put it in the dryer, put it back in the suitcase, travel a week for Ask, and then do the same.

And I just would spend like one week a month at home. That was kind of a crazy year! So I was eager to start doing more. I love home improvement content. And I really wanted to be more of the source of that content and start creating it.

And again, just so happened, associate producer left. And they said, Sarah, you work hard, the job is yours if you want it.  That was actually right before I got married, so it would have been nine years ago, and I’ve been working on Ask This Old House ever since. 

Now I’m the executive producer of the show and I oversee Ask This Old House and our Spanish language spin-off show, Dime Cómo Hacerlo, and a new show that we launched this spring, This First House, which is more of the This Old House model, but with first time home buyers and like teaching them how to go through the process of buying a house. All educational content, all pointing towards that same direction. We really want to build confident homeowners and make them feel like they can take care of the most valuable asset that they’re probably ever going to own. And there’s a lot of ways to do that.

The start that you describe—hearing directly from viewers, letters, calls, whatever might have come in—and then also working in the PA role supporting the crew. Some showrunners might have that experience of moving up, whereas others are moving laterally. 

You know the show and its audience in a way that maybe other [showrunners] don’t. I’m curious if that affects your day-to-day producing, or the way you’re thinking about either the crew or viewers or both.

Oh, yeah. I totally. Having the ability to grow in this role, on this specific show, has absolutely helped me lead the show.

As a producer, your whole job is asking for favors from people, right? You’re the one that has the overall vision, but you rely on everybody else’s expertise to actually execute that vision and make it good. I’m asking for favors from the camera crew. I’m asking for favors from the PAs. I’m asking for favors from the gaffers—Can you light this, but can you do it within the next 10 minutes, because we’re waiting for the mortar to cure? It’s a lot of that kind of stuff.

Never mind asking the talent: Hey, I know you have a full-time job running your own very successful business in the trades. Can you take some time away from that and come to this house with me? And see if this very small repair is fixable and would work good for the show and do you like that idea?

Because I had the privilege of being in all of those roles—except for being on camera, of course—I at least understand what I’m asking for, and when it’s reasonable and when it’s not. I feel like I’m in a good position to sort of throttle up or throttle down.

I turn, the people that I work with know that if I’m asking for something, it’s probably because I really need it. And so they try to find a way to make it happen. There’s just a lot of mutual respect between all of the team members.

A lot of my knowledge of production of home shows is HGTV, of course. Their model is either the homeowners actually pay for it themselves [and/or] there’s a lot of trade-outs and sponsorship that covers the cost. 

In your case, is the show covering everything? Are the homeowners contributing anything?

On Ask This Old House, we usually cover it, because the labor is usually just our people who we’re paying anyway. And the repairs are smaller. They’re not major remodels. 

In a couple of weeks, you’ll see an episode where Nathan Gilbert, our carpenter, does a whole door repair. And it’s the same front door, but it’s not shutting correctly, and so he repairs and replaces the hinges. He replaces the strike plate. He puts in new weatherstripping. That hardware is a few hundred bucks. And that’s about what our project size and scope are. We build that into our budget, those materials.

For Ask This Old House, these are things that I could theoretically do—maybe not as artfully or with some more broken things—but is that the idea?

That’s totally our M.O. for Ask This Old House. We want homeowners to watch it and walk away feeling confident that I could do this myself, following the instructions in the video that you guys just put together. Or, that seems a little bit out of my wheelhouse, but now that I understand how it’s done. I know what questions to ask. I know how to find the right tradesperson to hire. And I can mentally prepare for how long it’s going to take, how disruptive it’s going to be to my home, all those sorts of questions so that they can feel like they can improve their house.

Shortly before I started here in 2014, we launched our YouTube channel. We literally just cut our house calls out of the episodes and posted them as the original videos on that YouTube channel. 

Now, we take that a little bit more seriously—even the way that we film and edit the house calls, we have that YouTube channel in mind. People on that channel really want to replace their faucet. They may not want a four-minute tour of the whole house and the whole background story of how these people ended up here and all of those things. They just want to see the faucet. 

We’ve tried to steer the show a little bit editorially so that it’s more focused on just the project at hand. Since doing that, our viewership on YouTube is great and a lot of the younger homeowners that end up writing into the show are now finding us through that YouTube channel. We still get a lot of, I watched this show with my dad—isn’t it that one with Bob Vila? I’m like, Yeah, but it’s not Bob Vila hasn’t been on the show since before I was born. We are still here.

Now we’re getting people who are like, I actually had something break in my house and I looked up on YouTube how to fix it. And the video was really instructional and helpful. Saw that it was This Old House  and the next time I looked for a project, looked up The Old House, how to blank. From that point on, now they’re a fan in their own right. 

I think we’re really starting to see the value of using social media as a gateway to get people into our brand, whether they end up just watching it on YouTube or on PBS or the Roku Channel or Instagram or TikTok. We just want to help people fix their houses. So we’re happy with however they want to watch us.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s, I think, the mindset that all of us creating content, putting information into the world, need to be in. And I’m trying to adapt, a little bit, from  being a writer for 25 years into Oh, the kids are on TikTok searching for answers. I need to figure that out, but [social media] has become the resource that people go to.

It’s hard, right? You know, I don’t really use TikTok that much, and so I rely on my teammates here who do. That’s one real privilege of being part of a production company, is that we all bring our own flavor to it. 

Something we’re struggling with a little bit that I’ve flagged: Are we using our own algorithm to inform our editorial choices in a way that’s too specific and too niche? How do we figure out all the different kinds of home improvement content that’s out there that might be speaking to a different person’s algorithm? 

One of my coworkers is my age; he’s a man, he owns a lot of big power tools, lives on a large property. And I am the executive producer of this very much dad’s-attic home improvement show. Yet my algorithm sees me and goes, Oh, you are a mother of toddlers in your mid-thirties. So here’s some design content on how to have a killer mudroom.

How do we take that compared to what my coworker is getting, which is a lot of We tested this massive mega log splitter, and here were the results!

I so appreciate you saying that, and just thinking about the way these corporate media companies put us in our bubbles, and serve us what they think we want. And if that affects the content that you create, now you’re serving a different audience—the machine, not the human.

Yeah, totally. And so we think a lot about, What is our brand voice? What is the This Old House brand voice? What is the Ask This Old House brand voice under that? What is the Ask This Old House Instagram voice?

And how do they all speak to that big arch so that we’re true to who we are fundamentally since 1979, but still reaching people in a way that feels very 2026?

I’m curious about a couple of things with this Ask This Old House. When you’re going into people’s houses, how does that production work? I know obviously it takes longer than we see it, but are you there for days, hours? Tell me about how you choose those and how the production works.

Oh, that’s my favorite thing to talk about. So let’s go. The way that we find homeowners is they write into the show. We have on our website, Do you have a question for Ask This Old House? Submit it here.

People genuinely just write in. And then what we do is we narrow it down by production logistics first. So we will identify a few cities across the country that we want to travel to each year. There’s a myriad of reasons why we would pick a place. We want them to feel geographically dispersed. So if we go to Portland, Oregon, we’re probably not going to then pick Idaho, because they’re too close to each other. Maybe we would pick something in the South and the Midwest and the west coast, something like that. 

Then we go through the questions on the back end. There’s a database where you can filter by location—you can filter by a lot of things, but we mostly just do the location one. And I can say, I am looking for projects in—I’m going to use Portland again as my example—I’m looking for projects that are within 20 miles of Portland, Oregon.

Now I’m also thinking: If we’re going to fly a crew to Portland, Oregon, they’re on the clock. So how far of a drive do we want before we’ve even put cameras up, before we’ve even swung a hammer?

In Massachusetts, we roughly try to film within 30 miles of our production office, which is in Concord, Massachusetts. We obviously can go further than that, but that’s just a nice ballpark for us. Then we look through all the submissions. 

At that point, it’s just like, woohoo, what do you want to do? We’re looking for either homeowners and houses that we think would be cool to film in and logistically easy to film in, or really killer stories. Then we call the homeowners, we talk to them. I always ask every homeowner: If for some reason this project doesn’t work out, do you have a laundry list of projects that you would also be open to having the TOH touch on?

The answer is always yes. Who has a house that has one thing that they want to fix? They will give us a laundry list, and then usually us producers go first, and we do a full tour of the house. They show us everything on their laundry list. 

We take pictures; we’re taking mental notes of like, Can we park all the production vehicles that we need? Which is not a lot! It’s a small team, but we still are probably taking up like seven car spaces on a street. Is there easy access into the house? Because we’re carrying all this heavy production equipment. Are we going to make everybody go up three flights of stairs to do this project? We’re not opposed to that. But if it’s replacing a toilet, we could probably find a more accessible location to change a toilet. But if someone had this killer unique thing in their attic, we would still do it.

 Then we’re thinking about how big is the room? Can we fit three cameras and our lighting equipment and video village and all the things, and still film it in a way that is instructional? Because that is the overall goal is we want to teach homeowners how to actually do this project. Do we feel will be successful in this space? Once we’ve figured out all that stuff, then we bring our team of experts in.

I usually just will text them and be like, Hey, Jen, you know, we’ve got this interesting garden project. They’re really looking to do pollinators, but they, you know, don’t like these plants. What do you think? 

At that point, they’ll help us shape it. We’ve done a lot of pollinator content, but there’s actually this new plant or this new initiative by a local extension service that they think helps increase monarch butterfly migration—I’m completely making this up, but like these are the conversations that we have to try to shape and see if it’ll come to life.

They trust me and the other producers, but we all went to film school. We are not licensed tradespeople. So they usually like to go and look at it themselves and verify that’s what they’re seeing in the pictures is what it’s actually like on the ground.

Then we determine: Can the project be completed in roughly six to eight hours? If the answer to all that is yes, then we pick a date and we shoot it. And then we shoot for one day.

The crew usually arrives at seven, and then we film the project. The thing that kind of stinks is like we can’t leave till it’s done. So if we open up a wall and we’re like, Oh, the wiring in here is actually knob and tube, even though the rest of the house is Romex, we need to pivot and we need to figure something out. Those things happen. They don’t happen a ton, but it does happen.

We’re there until the project’s done. I always love when that’s 5 p.m. because I like putting my kids to bed at night. Sometimes it’s 7 p.m. I think the latest we’ve gone is 9 p.m. Sometimes we’ve got to call it and we’ll come back tomorrow. But in general, like they’re all done-in-a-day projects.

That’s impressive. The six to eight hours you described, is that six to eight hours assuming no camera crew, filming, and scenes? 

Yeah.

So that does not include the time to set up?

Exactly. Or the, Oh, can you do it again? Can you actually back that screw out and then drive it back in so that we can get another camera angle on it? I just find it’s easier because our experts are all really great on camera and they’ve most of them have been doing it for a while, but not nearly as long as they’ve been. licensed tradespeople just doing this every day. So I just to make it easy on them.

I just have them ballpark how long they would do it without us and all of the nonsense that we bring to it. Then I just mentally double it. 16 hours is really about as long as we’d want to go on a day. Usually, if we know it’s going to be a longer day like that, we can do some tricks on our end to speed up the process.

That’s interesting. The very first reality TV set I ever went on was Trading Spaces, and just watching them film scenes and then actually do the work in between while also filming scenes was fascinating. This is kind of artificial, but they’re still doing it—and then the designers stayed after I left.

It’s a lot of work that goes into [production]—it might end up in, what, a three-minute YouTube video?

I have a great story: We did a project in season 19. Tom Silva restored this beautiful front door that had all this intricate detail, and we had to take the door apart, and strip it down, sand it, refinish it. And I remember like being in the corner on the first day with like a paint thinner and a toothbrush. Just like trying to scrub the dental work to get all the finish off, like it was an all, all hands-on deck kind of project.

And then we got hit with this blizzard. We knew it was gonna be a two-day thing. On the second day, we wrapped at 9 p.m. We were getting set to film the final scene. The homeowner looked at me and she said, So, how long do you think this will be when it’s all edited? And I was like, I don’t know, probably like eight, eight and a half minutes. And she put her hands in her lap and just sort of went, Oh my god. Because it had been two very full labor intensive days for everybody. 

It can be hard when our tradespeople are itching to get the work done because they know we have to get it done by the end of the day. And our camera crew is also working hard to get it lit correctly and get the cameras in the right spot and try to get themselves set up so that they can be as minimally disruptive as possible. Those two things take time, and that can be frustrating.

So I always say, look, we’re trying to do two jobs in one day, right? We’re doing this project, and that’s going to take us the full day. And we are also trying to film something. And that is a day-long process. Sometimes those things intersect, but most of the time they don’t. And we have to wait on each other and really collaborate and work at a high level. And luckily, we have a really great team both in front of and behind the camera.

Most of the time it’s pretty seamless, but it’s definitely a lot of work to think through.

There’s a lot of women who work behind the scenes on [This Old House], and obviously showrunning it. But then, in front of camera, at least, are mostly older white men. I know that they have experience, and that also have history with the show. 

Are you looking to bring in new people over time? How do you think about casting from the expert side? 

It’s something we think about a lot, especially because a lot of our cast members are older. We always want to be mindful that they might want to retire at some point. Who do we bring in and who’s the next generation?

When we think about what our talent looks like, obviously their expertise and their qualifications have to come first. But it’s really top of mind for us that—I always like to say, especially on Ask, but certainly on [This Old] House, too, we’re such an all-American show, and we’ve got like this red, white, and blue trailer that drives across the country. We’ve been to all 50 states. 

It’s really important to me on the homeowner side that our homeowners are a reflection of what America looks like. And if we want our fans to be this all-American group of viewers watching, we want them to see themselves. With so many homeowners, that’s a little bit easier to hit. 

With our tradespeople, it’s a little bit harder because then you have to start thinking about, okay, what is the makeup of licensed tradespeople in the United States? What do they look like, and what are their identities, and where are they concentrated? Massachusetts is not a particularly diverse state, and that is where we’re based.

So trying to figure that out, and being mindful of how to bring people in—in a way that’s representative and thoughtful—is something we talk about a lot.

I appreciate that. It’s something that reality TV is dealing with over time too—sometimes those groups of people aren’t very well-represented. So you have to place expertise at the forefront, but also you want to represent and give those little kids swinging a hammer around someone to look up to.

Some of our team is going to a station event in Milwaukee tonight, and it was bringing back memories of some of the ones that I’ve gone to. I wish I could remember which station event it was—maybe it was in Nashville. 

But I was with Jen, and this mom and daughter came to the event and came up to the two of us, and they told Jen how much it meant to them to see her working with the tools and being on the show. The mom looked at me and said, And to see that one of the producers is also a woman just really means a lot. 

Jen and I afterwards were like, Oh, this is so nice. It was really touching. It does have an effect on people. Even my own kids who watch rough cuts with me—they don’t really watch the show once it’s polished—seeing the way that they take to tools. And the fact that my daughter—she’s two, and we’re doing work on our house right now—it doesn’t seem strange to her to pick up a tool. I’m helping mommy. It’s just special.

That’s awesome. The press release quote of yours that prompted me to reach out said, “The way people learn, watch, and ask questions has changed dramatically over 25 seasons. And we’ve evolved with them from how we film and tell stories.” 

I’m curious, from a production side, how has that evolved even over the past few years for you? I know you mentioned thinking about the YouTube audience.

Honestly, the thing that prompted us to change the most was COVID. You know, that was a really uncertain year for us. And we realized we needed to scale back in size and crew, you know, for health and safety reasons.

I remember talking with our DP at the time, and he was like, This is not a challenge, this is an opportunity. Think about all the things that we could be doing differently. 

We were being asked to change the way we filmed. So we got the excuse to reinvent how we did things. There were a few things that we did that changed the way I think that people could access us that I’m pretty proud of. 

Honestly, the biggest thing was switching to DSLRs. We were using ENG rigs [Electronic News Gathering cameras that fit over an operator’s shoulder]. 

We had this awesome—I missed this lens!—a 17- to 120-millimeter lens. It had a macro on it that allowed us to do just about everything on the show. But it was huge. Now we’re using [Sony] FX6s and FX3s, but they’re so much smaller. And when you think about the kinds of stuff that we’re trying to teach people, we want the camera to feel like the viewer looking over the shoulder of somebody as they’re actually doing the work.

So you have to get in close and really be able to see it. What we did for many years is just put GoPros in those tight areas, like behind a toilet, under a sink, all those places. Now we can use our real broadcast cameras to do that because they’re smaller.

We also started shooting with three cameras, which is amazing—mostly so that we could focus more on shooting the work as opposed to doing those lesson scenes, because now we’re getting a wide shot and both shots of the talent and the homeowner. And then we just go back through and we get close-ups from the table. Then we’ve banged that out in six takes as opposed to fifteen. And now we can actually just see them start swinging hammers, which is what we all want them to do, including them.

Can you fit three cameras in a bathroom? 

Yeah, we can! We can fit three cameras in a bathroom. We did an aging-in-place episode, and the homeowner had lived in the house her whole life, and we wanted to retrofit her bathroom so that she could use it. This bathroom—it’s so small. It was a narrow hallway with the tub at the end. And we were able to fit three cameras because we put one camera on a monopod in the tub. And it actually worked really well.

That was probably our tightest space. But that’s the challenge, particularly on Ask This Old House, because we are trying to get into those weird corners to see the things that other shows don’t really care about. 

If other home improvement shows are about the destination—the before and after, and feeling like you’ve seen a few moments to earn that destination—our show is totally about the journey. The before and afters maybe look nice, maybe it’s a nice improvement. But now you have gone along for this whole process, and using those little cameras and really getting in there makes a huge difference.

We also started shooting in high speed, which admittedly in the early seasons when we first started using it, definitely went a little bit overboard. But trying to match sports broadcasts, how they change the way they shot with players and stuff, it looks cool.

And what our tradespeople do is cool. We want people to see that in this show where we are replacing a bathroom medicine cabinet. We’re also doing cool stuff and trying to have an appreciation and a celebration of the hard work that skilled tradespeople do, because it’s really awesome.

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