flexible-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...

FabCab’s approach to sustainability is simple — design healthy, efficient environments to accommodate varied lifestyles. Dedicated to designing a space that is usable for people with a range of ages and abilities, they are equally dedicated to offering their clients eco-friendly and economically resourceful spaces.   T...

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...

Standard solar panels are rigid, relatively heavy and fragile. A new product on the market called Microsystems Enabled Photovoltaics (MEPV) from mPower Technology may change that. The cells in these pliable sheets are made from high-efficiency silicon, and if one cell is damaged or loses power, the rest will continue t...

On a wooded Canadian farmstead in rural Alberta, the new house replaced an old home that was no longer able to fulfill its function. The architectural concept for the new home was simple: open, flexible, efficient (almost Zero Net Energy), and for an economical budget - not everyone can manage to build affordable net z...

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...

The Skygarden House is a winner of the Canadian Green Building Awards and is a great example of the kind of transformation and performance enhancement that is possible with dilapidated houses in urban cores. *** The renewal of this beautiful century old, 225 m2 single family residence on a small urban lot in Toronto tr...

With write-ups in Gizmag, Inhabitat, Tiny House Design, FastCoExist and well, too many other places to recount, one could say it's clear that the green building world is enamoured with this Tiny House gem, and so are we. What's not to love: NOMAD Micro Homes are sustainably manufactured, easy to assemble, affordable, a...