healthy-basement-finishing / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

The most common practices currently employed for finishing basement interiors as living space rarely account for the impacts that come with the added moisture load below grade, or the amount of heat that will be lost to the ground. Existing basements are typically under-insulated or not insulated at all, and if they ar...

Basements don't have to be moldy, that is the first thing to realize. It's easy to build a basement better, or to finish an existing basement correctly, we just need to realize that they behave differently than above grade walls and to build accordingly to effectively deal with the humidity found underground - and by d...

Adhesives and sealants: Modern homes have a lot more caulking and adhesives than older homes. Adhesives are liberally applied to many surfaces for ease and speed of job completion, as well as to prevent squeaking between flooring and joists, for example. Functionally speaking, caulking is used to prevent moisture and a...

Wood ceilings - what's the the skinny? Ahhh, the charm of a wood ceiling, seriously, what's not to like? The intent of this page is less about talking you out of installing gypsum board (drywall), and more about giving you a little encouragement if you are hesitantly considering a wood ceiling. It’s a natural product t...

How to Install a Radon Barrier - Slab Floors If in the kind of area where it's a good idea to install a vapor barrier against radon ingress, (check out the Radon maps by state and province page to find out here) we can't stress enough how important it is to test for radon, or better still to continually monitor for hig...

That musty, moldy basement smell that we have come to accept as unavoidable, is actually quite avoidable. The solution is really quite simple - stop building below grade with walls that were designed for above grade and your basement won't smell like old gym socks and potentially make you ill with mold spores. As a fre...

  Protecting your indoor air quality: Any renovation or building project is exciting, but it can also be exhausting and emotionally taxing. Right at the end when it's time to furnish your new space can be one of the hardest times to stick to your environmental convictions. When you are finally ready to move in, the tem...

Polyisocyanurate (PIR), Extruded Polystyrene (XPS), Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) or Styrofoam? When building or renovating a high-performance building envelope there are really three main kinds of rigid foam panels you are going to have to choose from - Polyisocyanurate known as Polyiso (PIR), Extruded Polystyrene (XPS) ...

Formaldehyde-free MDF made from rice - available at distributors in USA & Canada There is a natural and Formaldehyde-Free alternative to MDF (Medium Density Fiberboard) made of rice straw hitting the green building market soon! That’s a reason to breath a sigh of relief (literally and figuratively) since a lot of p...

How to price a sustainable kitchen countertop? As a professional cabinetmaker, I have often been asked how much a kitchen costs. There is no accurate answer of course, though when pressed, I would have to say somewhere between $18-30,000. The size of your kitchen, material choices and your taste in finishing makes it i...

It is a very wise idea to have the air of your home checked for high levels of radon gas. Health Canada has identified exposure to radon gas as the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking, estimated to be the cause of 16% of diagnosed cases in the country. A high reading may come, not from having a uranium so...