volatile-organic-compounds / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

There is a current trend towards limiting the production of solvent-based paints, replacing them with solvent-free or water-based paints. The move towards safe paint has led to a noticeable improvement in indoor air quality since the mid-seventies, and better even in the last decade. But paints based on petrochemical s...

Mold in homes is a bad sign so how to get rid of it or prevent mold in drywall? Mold and mildew in homes develops in conditions of high humidity, most often in bathrooms, kitchens and basements, unless caused by roof leaks and other building envelope failures. Along with affecting the durability of your home, mold and ...

Preventing food waste - optimal fridge organization Did you know that there’s actually an ideal order or layout of how to organize food in the fridge? A way that could help prevent food waste, reduce grocery bills and improve how sustainable your household is?  So, to set the scene - you’re on your way home with your w...

Located in the bustling Griffintown neighborhood of Montreal, Canada, the mass timber Arbora mid-rise project is the largest complex of its kind in the world built with a wood-based structure. This innovative mid-rise development's time-lapse video of Arbora's frame and floor construction demonstrates how mass timber c...

The vision: a brighter future for Canada and North America through an evolving mid-rise construction industry Canada is the country of wood and we are all invested in the successful future of this sustainable industry. The construction of mid-rise buildings (between 6 and 10 floors) is the most important sector of the ...

The cost of lumber is at an all time high, and because of that fact, other wall assemblies are showing themselves to be more affordable in comparison. So it’s a great time to highlight a few alternatives.  Standard residential home construction in most colder climates now involves 2x6s and fiberglass insulation batts. ...

What is "FSC Certified" lumber? The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an international, not-for-profit organization created in 1994 whose mission is promoting responsible forest management and the production of sustainable lumber and wood products via their "FSC wood certification labels".  Their goal is to protect n...

Hemp is a very sustainable construction material that is no longer just a fringe product; rather, it is becoming a more accessible mainstream building product, most notably as hemp-batt insulation, and also hemp boards for cabinetry.  Why choose hemp building materials? The growing and harvesting of hemp is a far more ...

The commercial construction sector has warmly embraced cross-laminated timber (CLT) in recent years, taking advantage of it as the base structure, but also as a design feature. The assembly of smaller wood parts to create massive assemblies offers a new type of structure (for floors, walls and roofs), with significant ...

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 ...

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...