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Eric Stromer has built his reputation on showing people how to improve their homes.
When he’s on the road with A&E’s new “Hideous Houses,” the 51-year-old boyishly handsome host and his crew of 40-strong can turn around a project in four days flat.
But at home in Northridge, the affable father of three – Willow, 6, Dusty, 9 and Wyatt, 14 – is like anybody else with a demanding career and close-knit family.
He tackles what he can, when he can. | See photo gallery.
“Now frame out the fact that I haven’t gotten the rocks around the liner there,” he says, chuckling, as a photographer scopes out the nearly completed water feature in the back yard.
A work in progress, the landscaped area was a family project designed to conserve water and save money. It used to be just another rose bed in the big, open yard – a patchwork of wide expanses of lawn, swimming pool, horse stable and child play structures.
“Are you kidding me? My water bill is like a million dollars a day,” Stromer says while showing off the creek he designed and built with help from his kids with wife Amy Tinkham, a director of major pop tours such as Paul McCartney and the Dixie Chicks.
Together, dad and kids carved out an elegant man-made creek that meanders down and around curvy beds of California native and succulent plants.
“All you do is waste water and then everything dies when it’s this hot,” he says, standing in the triple-digit heat near a struggling apricot tree.
Around the tree, new drought tolerant plantings abound.
The lush new area illuminates at night with bright LED landscape lights by Malibu Lights. In the day, it bustles with birds and the sound of water splashing off a 4,400-pound boulder.
A recirculating pump pushes the creek water up, over and through a copper pipe at the top of the boulder continuously. The natural path of the creek required using a jack hammer at times to make a dent in the hard, clay soil.
To water the plants, Stromer installed a subsurface drip irrigation system, which also can be buried beneath a lawn.
“Have you heard about these? It’s literally emitter tubes that you coil underneath the ground and there’s no overspray or water waste at all,” Stromer says in that easy-going manner that’s made him a favorite of home improvement TV and radio.
Like many people who come to Los Angeles, the Chicago native wanted to be an actor.
He caught the bug in 1978 when he was plucked from his high school to play the dumb football player in a Kit Kat commercial, and in his typical self-effacing manner he says it wasn’t a stretch. When he arrived in L.A., he eventually found work on the ’80s daytime drama “Santa Barbara.”
But his character died tragically and unexpectedly in what he calls “the big Styrofoam boulder earthquake” that rocked the show.
“Here’s when you know your time is up,” he says, “when they’re putting the soot makeup on your face in black streaks and you’re asking, `Why are you doing this?”‘
That’s when his illustrious years of general contracting began.
He had previous experience, including summer high school and college jobs painting turn-of-the-century houses in his community of Evanston, Ill. So the out-of-work actor took to painting his neighbor’s apartments and charging little.
“I was the cheapest painter in Santa Monica at the time,” he says, adding it was only a matter of time before he started taking on remodeling projects.
He had found his niche.
Then, several years ago, while he was bidding on an electrical job in an office building, a woman stepped into the room and asked if he was there to audition for TLC’s “Clean Sweep.”
Stromer has since done a series of home-improvement television shows, including HGTV’s “Over Your Head.” His latest is “Hideous Houses,” which airs 10 a.m. Saturdays with brother Kurt Stromer and designer Megan Weaver, who have four days to turn the local town eyesore into the envy of the neighborhood with a budget of $20,000.
“The business of general contracting is not easy but I was really good at it,” he says. “There’s this psychological component of ushering people through a process from Point A to Point B and making them feel reassured and confident that this was the right thing to do. It really is overwhelming for people when you start pulling the walls of their house, metaphorically speaking.
“My motivation at the time was to get my final payment because I wanted to eat,” he says. “Now it’s the same psychology but you’re trying to get people to feel at ease on TV and open up about their lives.”
Stromer is also known as host of the “Home Wizards” call-in talk show on KFWB (980 AM), with Cindy Dole. It airs 8 to 10 a.m. Saturdays.
With all that, he still finds time to tackle remodeling projects at home.
Next up: Stromer plans on building his aging parents a modular house and edible garden on his property; and, of course, tearing up the roses in favor of more California native and succulent plants.
“I’m just a huge fan of this because it’s easy,” Stromer says. “I was gone for a month, I come back and it’s exactly like I left it.
“I still have the lining to cover with stacks of rock, which requires me getting back in the water,” he says. “But when you do go in there, it feels a little bit like you’re Chris Atkins in `Blue Lagoon.”‘
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