ecological-house / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

The environmental advantages of wood frame construction: As a renewable building material, wood has many advantages over other materials. It requires less energy to produce in terms of resource extraction, manufacturing, and transportation. While still prevalent in residential construction, wood has largely been replac...

Alternatives to grass lawns - ground covers!  North American backyards have one main point in common – Kentucky blue grass. But here we’re talking about ground covers and alternatives to this grass, not a bunch of fiddle and banjo players jamming in your backyard.  The traditional green grass we use to cover our front ...

Bluewater Health announced today that it has been selected as one of the first Canadian hospitals – and the first acute care hospital in Ontario – to achieve LEED® certification. Bluewater Health’s construction of a 588,000-square-foot complex at the hospital’s Sarnia location consisted of a new addition attached to th...

Design basics for flexible housing: Depending on the stage you are at in your life, you might have kids, they might be gone or you might want to have some in the future. Design floor plans that work for you right now but can be easily adapted to accommodate different family dynamics in the future. Flexible housing star...

What tiny home living is all about: Inspired by the Tiny House Movement, Chris and Malissa Tack designed a 140 Square foot home that sits on a 7’ x 20’ trailer bed. This traditional looking home with gable roof and dormers just happens to be mobile. Though neither Chris nor Malissa are builders by trade (he's a photogr...

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 great stories and photos to share. Today's winner is the Fun Box, available for a luxurious weekend rental as of the summer of 2013. Made by Le Vertendre, the Fun Box is a 36...

Passive House design, how does it work? If you've ever sat in a car with black leather seats in the summer, particularly when wearing shorts, you already understand passive solar heat gain. It is a very simple concept that as a building technique dates back thousands of years. You simply need to find out where south is...

What is a Passive House? The term 'passive house' refers to an extremely high performing energy efficient home, in the sense that the heating and cooling is largely passive. To achieve this, homes have to be designed to take advantage of the free heat available from the sun, and heavily fortified with insulation to han...

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 be inspired by it just the same.  The most obvious and unusual design feature about the Fin...

The tiny house movement is on the far end of the scale of a very encouraging and growing trend towards modern smaller home sizes. Small homes take less materials to build than large homes, and they consume less energy to operate. Ergo, smaller homes are ‘greener’ homes. At least most of the time…  Tiny houses are on on...

Alex Wilson is the founder of the journal Environmental Building News, Green Building, GreenSpec and recently the Resilient Design Institute. The following is a brief description of his vision, and the steps our team took as designers, builders and homeowners to meet that criteria for the Kenogami House. The acronym: E...