exterior-walls / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

How to insulate house walls from the outside Adding extra insulation to the exterior walls of an older home when renovating or remodeling is a great way of improving a home's walls thermal performance and reducing energy use while reducing heating bills, carbon footprint and improving a building's comfort level. It may...

Stucco as an exterior home finish Stucco is a classic and versatile exterior finish that has been used for centuries to protect and beautify homes. A mixture of cement, sand, water, and lime, it is a durable and fire-resistant option that provides a seamless, monolithic look. However, choosing stucco for your home requ...

As a precursor to a new post exploring everything you wanted to know about Dry Rot but were afraid to ask, we wanted to cover the causes, effects and solutions for interstitial condensation in walls and roofs. We’ve all heard of condensation, but has anyone ever heard of interstitial condensation? If you haven’t (or ev...

OSB v plywood - which is best? Odds are, that if you pass a housing development of wood-framed houses, it will have OSB (oriented strand board) as exterior sheathing. When you count sub-floors, roofs and wall sheathing, OSB claims about 70% of the wood sheathing market in North America over plywood. Both products have ...

Gabion walls are retaining walls built by stacking stone in a gabion cage or gabion basket that can serve many purposes but are most often used to create tiered or leveled ground in gardens.  They are rectangular baskets of metallic lattice filled with stones and their origin dates back to war times when they were erec...

Walls in residential homes are almost exclusively finished using gypsum board (either recycled or synthetic) because it is cheap and easy. It is however, not the only option for interior walls, and it has some other competition - especially in areas that may get humidity. We will start with drywall, but also list off a...

Comprehensive thermal overcoating: a homeowner's & pro's guide Comprehensive thermal overcoating is the process of wrapping an existing building envelope in a continuous blanket of high-performance insulation to eliminate thermal bridging and move the dew point safely outside the structural wall.  This guide provid...

  Hempcrete walls: a homeowner's and pro's guide More people all the time are looking for more healthy and eco-friendly building materials that are sustainable, resilient and non-toxic. Hemp is one such material. It took a very long time for hemp to take its rightful place in the home bulding industry, due to nothing m...

Siding is important! There is no stage of home construction that you should rush through, but if there were, it shouldn't be siding. Whatever type of siding product you choose, purchase and installation is not cheap, so you don't want to do it again anytime soon. Your siding needs to protect your home from the weather,...

See more videos about passive solar high performance home building here  Once a decision has been made to choose between a crawlspace or a slab foundation, you need to know how to finish the edge off durably. Typically the exterior edge of a slab on grade is made of EPS foam and can be parged. Having used rigid Rockwo...

Larson truss wall systems for new green home building & renovations for max wall insulation A Larsen Truss is a type of lightweight & non structural double-stud wall assembly that allows for thicker insulation, is ideal for dense-packed cellulose insulation wall systems and a very high R-value building envelope...