EXCLUSIVE: ‘Rehab Addict' Star Nicole Curtis Issues Warning About the Scariest Risks Involved in Renovating an Old Home

Yahoo

09-07-2025

Historic-home renovator and 'Rehab Addict' star has issued a serious warning to any budding property restorers about the risks involved in overhauling a much older house, while sharing her ultimate pet peeve when it comes to these kinds of transformations.
While the 48-year-old HGTV star appreciates as much as anyone the appeal of an aged abode filled with character, she knows all too well that these properties can often come with plenty of dangerous and pricey pitfalls that the untrained eye is unable to spot—until it's too late.
Curtis, who has been rehabbing timeworn dwellings across the Midwest for the past 30 years and has just revived her hit series after taking a three-year hiatus, has seen more than her fair share of DIY woes during her decades-long career.
But she confesses that even she is still learning new things with every renovation she takes on, explaining that she is adamant about sharing that knowledge at every available opportunity to help other renovators avoid similar mistakes.
To that end, Curtis now includes warnings in her show, including one that highlights the dangers of lead, something that she realized could result in a major issue after a viewer raised concerns about her restoration of old claw-foot tubs.
'I always put a lead warning in,' she explains to Realtor.com®. 'I learned from a fan that [the] old claw-foot tubs, which we weren't reglazing … that children could absorb lead [from them] when we put them in the bathtub.
'That's really why I started reglazing all of our tubs.'
Protecting children, including her own sons Ethan and Harper, motivates Curtis to stay vocal about the downsides of dealing with old building and design materials.
'We've lived around a renovation for many years and I've learned, so I love to pass that education on,' she says.
'[With] my first son, I was a young, poor, single mommy juggling 14 different jobs and selling s–t on Craigslist to make ends meet, so we lived through our renovations.
'We always say we didn't have a kitchen, we had a 'bitchen' because we had a bathroom we used as a kitchen while we were renovating the kitchen. I mean, it was just a drywall mess all the time.'
Those types of messes are precisely what Curtis now warns others about.
'If you have young children at home, young children and the elderly are very susceptible to mold, asbestos, lead,' she explains. 'I think sometimes you watch TV and you think, 'Oh, well, I'll just go tear out that wall today,' and you have a 6-month-old crawling around the floor and they're ingesting all that, so it's really important for me to be a safety advocate.'
Curtis also champions hiring reputable contractors to properly dispose of hazardous materials.
'Finding licensed individuals that are professionals that know what they're doing, that follow safety procedures—we abate our asbestos correctly,' she says. 'We're not taking it out, throwing it in a dumpster. We have a whole team that does that. We have a whole team that does mold remediation. Things like that, I try to touch on it.'
In addition to health and safety issues, Curtis is also outspoken when an old home's aesthetics have been updated in a way that ignores its history.
'You know how many people I see buy an old house and they tear all the guts out, they take all the walls out, and I walk in and I'm like, 'Well, if you wanted a house built in 2025, go build a house in 2025,'' she says.
One of the biggest issues Curtis has with renovators who totally overhaul old homes is that they often replace quality, custom, original elements with mediocre materials.
'That is my pet peeve because we can't get these materials back,' she says. 'Original tile is one of those things they see a crack and then some yahoo contractor comes in and spends two days demoing and I'm like, 'Man, I could have solved that problem for, like, $50 and a scrub brush.'
'That's the thing that really infuriates me, and so first, I always do a soft approach with education, like, 'This is why I don't want you to lose your original front door—it was handcrafted on site, it's made to fit that old house [so] a new one's just not going to do it.''
Beyond educating others about properly repairing irreplaceable features on her TV show, Curtis admits she regularly speaks up online—and shows no mercy when her advice is ignored.
'You'll always find me on old house [websites],' she adds. 'If someone has a problem, I just type in, like, 'Hi, don't tear it out!' Then if they don't listen to me, I try old-fashioned mom-shaming.'
The Michigan native believes her unforgiving approach is how she makes sure the city of Detroit doesn't lose all its old architecture to the recent rash of modern makeovers.
'We've had a tremendous comeback in the last decade, but people are white-boxing our old houses or tearing them down in general, and that's just something that I'm going to continue to fight against,' she says.
'I'm going to continue to be vocal about it, and, you know, that was another reason for us to come back [to TV] because people, if I get quiet, they think they can get away with it. But I'm back, [so] there's no getting away with it.'
And there's no getting away with it in other states, either. The Wyoming house that's highlighted on the show this season had been completely updated with contemporary finishes before Curtis bought it, and it became her mission to reverse the renovations once she took ownership.
'After I got there, I was like, 'This would make a great show because it shows everything that I am so against,'' she shares.
'It had every example of a bad flip that you could imagine: The gray engineered floors. The gray crappy carpeting. The drop ceiling. The nipple lights. The ceiling fan. The, like, store-bought cabinets that are just thrown in and none of the pieces are matching. It was all carpeting inside, and it looked so sad.'
One restoration at a time, Curtis is returning these old homes to their former glory and inspiring others to do the same. And while she believes anyone can be capable of preserving an old home, she cautions the process requires a ton of patience.
'Old house restoration is not supposed to be fast,' she says. 'If it was supposed to be fast and easy, then our houses would look generic, like a developer flipped it, and like every other house on the block—and we definitely don't want that.
'It's not leaving it to the experts, it's leaving it to the people that like old houses,' she adds. 'So it's one of those things that you've got to remember why you're doing it.'
As it turns out, Curtis' passion for old homes is not only her career niche, it's also a personal preference that extends to her family home base in Los Angeles and all the properties in her personal real estate portfolio.
'Of course, we live in old houses! We have a few family homes, but they're all old houses,' she reveals, before sharing just how closely life imitates art.
'They're still works in motion. This is what I do for a living, and I just found some sconces for one of our living rooms that I've been on the hunt for for 20 years! It's just always that [way], but of course, I live in an old house. You wouldn't find me in anything else—ever!'
'Rehab Addict' airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on HGTV and streams the next day on HBO Max and discovery+.
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