flex-housing / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

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...

Are Tiny Houses Worth it? Are Tiny houses a good investment? That depends on your lifestyle and how well you build them. Here are some things to think about before you join the Tiny House Movement and commit to life in an extremely small space.  We have featured a number of tiny houses on our pages over the past few ye...

From underneath a bed, under a subfloor or the underside of the staircase, there are many underutilized areas in a home that can make life in a small home a lot less cluttered. Here are some ideas on how to transform dead space into storage space. Use the bottom of the bed as a storage with drawers on wheels. There...

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, Chief Sustainability Officer for United Technologies Climate, Controls & Security. There is no doubt that sustainability initiatives and envir...

Canada continues to demonstrate its progress in fighting climate change with 204 registered and 211 certified LEED  projects in Canada between May and September 2015. This brings the current total number of LEED certified projects in Canada to 2,466 – second highest in the world. Buildings play a critical role in the b...

Working with charitable housing groups like Habitat for Humanity, the CaGBC will administer free registrations and certifications under the internationally-recognized Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building certification program, which addresses homes as well as a broad range of other buildi...

First published in SAB magazine. Kim Barnsley Is a senior architect at the Vancouver office of Perkins+Will. The way we live is changing. As both an architect and a resident of Vancouver, I am regularly confronted with how our cities are changing through urban densification and shifting demographics, to accessibility a...

1. Asphalt shingles: Asphalt shingles © Ecohome We’ll start with shingles to get it out of the way, because choosing an eco-friendly, durable roof covering starts first with dismissing any idea of installing asphalt shingles. High-embodied energy, rarely if ever recycled, they deteriorate rapidly with UV rays, emit s...

Buying a house in retirement Are you planning to downsize, move closer to family, or relocate to your dream retirement destination? While changing homes is typically associated with younger adults, many seniors are making the decision to buy a home in retirement. However, buying at 65 isn’t quite the same as buying at ...

LEED Platinum V4 Wall Design: Building Science  The wall we designed for the Edelweiss house, Canada's first LEED Platinum V4 Home is best categorized as a 'REMOTE' wall, a high performance building envelope developed by the Cold Climate Housing Research Centre in Alaska. REMOTE stands for 'Residential Exterior Membr...

Finding sustainable wood: We live in a country with over 400 million hectares of forest, so the supply is there; it's simply a case of properly managing it. That also means that when we cut one down, we should plant another. Wood is a renewable material, requires little processing and can almost always be purchased loc...