Sustainable building materials are more and more available these days. “Sustainable” means the materials are manufactured in environmentally responsible ways. They may be made from recycled materials, such as tile or wallboard. (more…)

      It is a bit of a dilemma when it comes to communicating your ideas to your architect, interior designer, or builder. Words don’t really do the job effectively. You have a “picture” in your mind, but even with the most well chosen words, you can not be sure the message is being conveyed. The person you are speaking to may be creating a completely different image in their mind than the one you are describing seeing in your mind. (more…)

      An energy management system can reduce your electric bill and help reduce energy demand at peak times. This system monitors and controls what equipment can come on during certain hours of the day. It may block an electric water heater from starting until an air conditioner that is already running has completed its cycle. (more…)

      When it comes to “building green,” There are other energy-saving measures that can occur behind the scenes. Proper insulation, including draft blocking to prevent convective loops of cold or warm air within walls and ceilings will reduce heat loss in winter and heat gain in summer. (more…)

      Are your windows locked? We don’t tend to think of air leakage in the summer like we do in the wintertime. When it’s cold, we can feel the cold drafts wafting through the house. (more…)

      Here’s a discussion that came up today on one of my projects. We were making a brick selection for the exterior of the house. The brick companies readily provide sample boards that have thin pieces of actual bricks, not just photos, for you to see. That’s very helpful, but the problem is that the cardboard sample boards do not have any mortar between the bricks. If there are sample boards with “mortar,” they use a synthetic mortar substitute because real mortar would break out on a board like this. It may or may not be the color of the mortar you will be using. Either way, the true, final color that your brick wall will produce is not readily apparent. (more…)

    Last week, at BookExpo America, I was discussing my book with a young woman and I mentioned that it concerned me how there is such hysteria and fanaticism surrounding anything touted as being green or environmentally friendly and often these things are not very “green” and maybe have negative environmental implications that are not readily appreciated. I pointed to compact fluorescent lightbulbs, known as CFL‘s, as an example. (more…)

Make It Perfect

      I call my book Designing Your Perfect House. The idea is that Your perfect house is different from the next persons’s perfect house. What you want your house to be can and should be unique to you and your family. My message today is this. Don’t be afraid to express your feelings. Don’t be shy about letting the builder know what you expect and how you want things to turn out.  (more…)

        An even simpler way to think about how to situate parts of a house with regard to climate and weather is to imagine yourself standing outside on your property on a sunny, windy winter day. To stay warm, you would naturally turn away from the north wind and face the southern sun. You might even turn your collar up. By making this simple adjustment, you would be sheltering yourself from the wind and maximizing the solar heat gain from the sun. Well, that’s exactly what architects do for houses when they place the garage in the path of the prevailing wind and position the windows toward the sun. The house is responding to the climate in the same way you would. These ideas are the first steps in passive solar design. And best of all, there’s no added cost for any of this. By merely acknowledging and responding to the climate of the site, the house will live in harmony with the nature around it. (more…)

      These days, it seems like everything anyone sells is energy efficient, green, or sustainable in some way. Those are the words plastered on the products we buy because without those claims, a product is virtually unsaleable in this climate (pardon the pun) of environmental zeal. This is a good thing, as Martha Stewart would say, but sometimes it’s a bad thing. The good thing is that energy efficiency can save you money and possibly the planet, if you buy into that hysteria. Even if you don’t conserving resources is simply a responsibility we all have. (more…)