Our blogs feature all things home remodeling, design and build with wide-flung interpretation. Here we cover design concepts for kitchens, bathrooms, and home additions. We also cover green building, building science and building materials. In the wider-flung reaches we cover urban design, the psychology of happiness and celebrations of those things. We are also happy to take and answer your questions.
Check out the recent articles written about us:
Selecting the Correct Window: Efficient Characteristics
So, what are defining characteristics of window types? The main distinctions in windows include the number and type of glass panes, as well as any coatings on the glass pane.
Selecting the Correct Window: Learning from Labels
It’s great that there are so many options of high efficiency windows that you can choose from. This makes saving energy and increasing the comfort of your home all that much easier to do. Though, easier might not seem like the right word when you’re staring at a vast array of windows. But, there are labels with information on each window to help you not feel overwhelmed or out of the loop when you and your contractor are selecting upgraded windows to install.
Defining Green Products
As more and more green products develop, it becomes harder to compare them and choose between them. What does it even mean when a product is “green”? And what qualities should you look for when selecting products for your home? The following are some green product criteria that we felt would help clarify what really makes a product green.
Developing Green Products: Flame Retardants
Today’s blog is a shout out about a flame retardant product that is being developed and tested at Texas A&M. It’s made from natural and renewable resources: layers of clay and a polymer from crab shells. These layers are designed to help prevent a fire from igniting a surface instead of trying to extinguish it after ignition like most fire retardants.
Learning from the Past: Additions & Reuse
Our green building tip-from-the-past for today is that a local material available to you is your existing home. In the past, families built on to their homes, or adapted certain room functions to make the building usable and comfortable as they grew. You can similarly be sustainable through managing and improving your “home resource” to ensure it continues to be your present sanctuary while having the ability to be available for future generations.
Learning from the Past: Local Materials
Today’s glance at the past to help with green building in the present is more about a building ideology than a building type. When most people built their homes and businesses a hundred years ago, they didn’t order bamboo flooring that took months to cross the pacific from Asia. Instead, they used the materials readily available around them. And we can do the same.
Learning from the Past: Adaption & Simplicity
Let’s take a look at another vernacular house design and think about ways it relates to green home building for Bryan-College Station. Today’s building style under examination is the shotgun house.
Learning from the Past: Breezeways
What other building types and techniques from the past can direct our development of green building? Let’s take a look at the “dog run” or “dogtrot” house. This type of building contained two separate rooms or structures that were connected by a single large roof. The connection created a breezeway or “dogtrot” between the structures that pulled cooler air through the space and created a pleasant, covered outdoor area.
Learning from the Past: Thermal Mass Walls
It is often said that learning from the past helps us avoid future mistakes. Could it be possible that techniques and constructions methods for homes 100 years ago could help shape and guide our green building ideas of today?
Transforming Single-Family Homes: Connection
There was a recent article in the opinion section of the New York Times that very poignantly identified the need for changes in the housing industry, especially the rising need for thinking-outside-of-the-box in regard to single-family homes. What are some changes in designing that should take place? And how can these changes be beneficial to you, your community, and the environment?
Stopping Air Leakage: Spot Sealing and Unvented Attics
Sealed attic, part of a home remodel in Bryan
“Green” Your Home: Remodels and Repairs
Remodeling is a great opportunity to “green” your home. It’s just another reminder that you don’t have to build a completely new home to make it environmentally conscious and efficient. Take for example an article in the Journal of Light Construction yesterday. It discussed how the decision to replace siding on a 120-year-old home in Massachusetts turned into an opportunity to add insulation to the home and make it more thermally (and there for energy) efficient.
Cutting Useless Energy Use
Practically anything you leave plugged in uses energy even when it isn’t on. Some devices that bring up digital displays when they’re turned off draw in more energy than when they are on! So, how can you stop this useless use of energy that gets added to your utility bill without breaking your back by unplugging every single plug?
Creating a Healthy, Happy Home Environment (Part 7)
One person can produce up to 5 lbs of trash per day - -meaning a potential 1,900 lbs per year! Just imagine if all of this accumulated inside your home at one time! As much as you don’t like taking the garbage out, it seems preferable to the alternative. Keeping your trash bags in a closeable garbage can is an easy way to prevent vermin and stray animals from tearing into the bags. Scattered trash will not only invite more vermin to snoop around, but will also most likely end up in storm drains and sewers which will eventually litter local bodies of water.
