Planning & Designing Sustainable Green Homes

Living Building Challenge

What is the Living Building Challenge?

The Living Building Challenge is the most rigorous and comprehensive of all building rating systems, certified on merit alone after 12 months of occupancy. What is the Living Building Challenge? The Living Building Challenge is the most rigorous and comprehensive of all building rating systems. Performance…

Recycled and Reclaimed Materials

Reclaiming sunken timber from the log drive

Salvage companies are pulling up logs from the bottoms of rivers, where a century and a half of log drives has left behind a lot of great wood. As a kid growing up along the Gatineau River in Quebec, watching tugboats pulling log booms down the river was commonplace, and logs that got loose were a great source of…

Tiny house

Have a backyard home office delivered by truck

The Archipod: Beautiful, Functional & Environmentally Sound. I'm sure we can all agree that as the cost and inconvenience of commuting to work continues to escalate, the advances in networking technology are making the possibility of working from home a viable alternative to schlepping ourselves to the office. When…

Passive House

The Un-certified but 'Damn Near' Passive House.

Sustainable building practices can reach the stage where cost effectiveness becomes questionable & when money should be used optimally. The "Damn Near" is a Passive House on a Budget to prove the point. What is a Passive House? The term 'passive house' refers to an extremely high performing energy efficient home…

Lifestyle and environment

Green building is accelerating around the world

Far from the days of being a fringe element trend, the benefits and necessity of sustainable building practices are now sweeping across the globe. Courtesy of the USGBC , the following is a guest post by Harvey M. Bernstein, Vice President of Industry Insights & Alliances, McGraw-Hill Construction and John Mandyck…

Tiny house

Tiny Houses: The FabCab prefabricated building WA

Integrating Douglas Fir timber frames and structural insulated panels, FabCab offers universal accessibility in its eco-friendly homes, cabins and accessory dwelling units (ADUs). FabCab’s approach to sustainability is simple - design healthy, efficient environments to accommodate varied lifestyles. Dedicated to…

Tiny house

The Fun Box! Solar, wind and human powered luxury living

The Fun Box is a masterpiece of energy and space saving solutions that translates into it's own brand of decadence. Check out the photos, and don't miss the YouTube video. There seems to be a design trend of trying to out-cool the previously coolest tiny house, and as long as that keeps happening we will keep having…

Lifestyle, location and commuting

Vancouver's goal of becoming the Greenest City by 2020

As part of their Greenest City 2020 initiative, the City of Vancouver is getting people out of their cars and onto bikes and trains, as well as setting new standards for energy efficient construction. Is Vancouver a green city with easy public transportation? The city of Vancouver continues to go to great lengths to…

Tiny house

Vancouver 's laneway house movement is increasing urban density

Taking advantage of lanes in the middle of city blocks to increase housing density is but one step Vancouver has taken towards ensuring sustainable urban living. Ths is the first of two stories about the city's green initiatives. Vancouver has been fighting the good fight in a battle against urban sprawl that…

Tiny house

The Fincube off-grid tiny house

The Fincube tiny house is off-grid, portable and enjoys a 360 degree view of the world. The Fincube is a pre-fab multi-purpose dwelling, it's built to operate off-grid, it's portable, and it's beautiful. It's also made in Italy so would hardly be a "green" choice for a North American dweller, but one can't help but…

Off-grid and Net-Zero Housing

Net Zero Energy house in Edmonton, Alberta

Three homes designed to approach or achieve Net Zero Energy consumption are now complete in the Belgravia neighbourhood in Edmonton. This project, affectionately referred to as Belgravia Green, is a collaboration between home owners, local experts and Effect Home Builders . Together they are pushing the envelope to…