Dale Earnhardt Jr.: Home renovation show has nothing to do with retirement
KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- Dale Earnhardt Jr. wanted to set the record straight about his upcoming home renovation series debuting in 2018 on the DIY Network.
Earnhardt said Friday at Kansas Speedway that there is no connection to the four-episode show and his retirement from the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season, effective the end 2017.
The show is just a means to refurbish a property Earnhardt and his wife, Amy, purchased in Key West, Fla., more than two years ago.
“I’ve been wanting to talk about this because I think everybody’s got a little bit different idea,” Earnhardt said. “We bought this property a long time ago, and we didn’t know what to do with it, and I was trying to figure out a way to renovate it reasonably …”
The Earnhardts have some friends at the DIY Network and HGTV and reached out to them for advice.
"‘We said, ‘We really want to renovate this property,' ” Earnhardt said, “and there’s a cool process you go through in Key West with the historic foundation on how you can renovate down there, what you can fix and can’t fix. … If you have a rotten board, they only let you replace the rotten area and you have to keep the rest … And they go through the whole house sort of picking apart what you can and can’t fix.
“The folks down there that are in charge of the Old Town, you can’t just demolish houses. They want everything to look the same and look like it’s been for a hundred years.”
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That’s when Earnhardt, 42, got the idea.
“I thought this would make a great show,” Earnhardt said. “We were talking to them about two and a half years ago, about whether we could do this, would it be interesting to them. Would I have the time to do it? And we finally got it agreed upon to put it together.
“It’s not going to take a ton of my time, but I definitely want to be involved; and Amy and I both want to be involved quite a bit. It just kind of connects to trying to renovate this home in a financially responsible way. And the show helps us do that and that’s the end of it.
"I don’t know what comes of it afterwards or what this might be a springboard to. We’re certainly open to anything. But, that’s really the story from the top to the very bottom of it. There’s no hidden agenda.”
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