mobile-home / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

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...

The tiny house movement is a fascinating trend that draws attention to one of the greatest problems with the housing industry; how big our homes have become. But the custom homes being built on trailer beds have many limitations, mainly because they need to comply with the rules of the road as a vehicle. So they aren’...

Three years ago, professor Lucas Brown’s students in Green Mountain College’s Renewable Energy and Ecological Design (REED) class built a custom-designed tiny house, a 96-square-foot structure with a sleeping loft “upstairs” and a 300-watt solar powered electrical system. This semester, his class went one better, con...

As the effects of climate change become more pronounced every year, it is becoming virtually impossible for the most ardent climate change deniers to dismiss it, despite their valiant efforts. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): "Rising global average temperature is associated with widespread change...

Spending more time at home in the last few months since Covid-19 redefined our reality has presented many with an opportunity to clean, rearrange furniture and make lifestyle modifications. One thing we noticed at home was that some of the items that found their way into our recycle bin, or worse, the trash bin, really...

Countless inventors are stepping up to the plate with the latest and greatest green technologies that will save the planet. This is great to see, but the waters of sensible change will no doubt be muddied along the way by some failed attempts, some questionable claims, and perhaps even a little snake oil!  We found the...

The first thought of home lighting design should be the orientation of windows for quality of life, but also passive solar heat gain. Not only does the sun offer free heat, but free light as well. Natural and certain types of artificial lighting can reduce the symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.). Studies s...

The low carbon footprint of the S1600 kit house The Ecohabitation Eco-Habitat S1600 prefab kit home was designed by PARA-SOL Architecture & Development and built by Batiment Pre-Fab Inc. The experts of Ecohabitation recently calculated the total carbon footprint of this surprisingly affordable prefab eco home, whic...

Not all insulation materials are the same, and they are not always interchangeable A basic understanding of how walls work is needed to help you understand what you can reasonably expect insulation and building materials to do for you when they are part of a wall assembly. If you have a working knowledge of building sc...

Preventing flood damage in basements is a hot topic as we are regularly seeing the effects of climate change in the form of extreme weather events and unpredictable weather patterns. Snow melt combined with torrential spring rains can lead to very high water tables and consequently, sewage backflow is an increasing dan...

Proper planning is the key to successfully building a sustainable green home. An energy-efficient ‘eco home’ doesn’t necessarily need to cost a lot more than a code-built home because a lot of that depends on design, but choosing and finding green building materials can take a bit longer as they often need to be specia...