Planning & Designing Sustainable Green Homes

Get money for your old building material and Find used building materials on classified lists and through online brokers. When buildings are decommissioned there can be a lot of valuable materials that could be used again, but when buyers can’t find sellers, otherwise usable materials are being sent to a land fill…

Are you wondering how to build a tiny house for living in cold climates? How much insulation does a tiny house need? See plans for the best tiny house on wheels that we've ever seen. How to heat and live in a tiny house in a cold climate? Are tiny houses a good investment? That depends on how you want to live and…

The owner of this beautiful prefab eco home, Roman Szumski, is a physician and pathologist & was deeply involved in the process of designing & constructing a healthy home for his family. Prefab LEED Platinum kit house in Montreal Ellen and Roman Szumski earned LEED® Platinum certification for their home in Labelle…

Two new types of mass timber panels similar to cross-laminated timber are hitting the North American construction market. 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…

Both plywood & OSB have benefits & drawbacks, with much misinformation about permeability - Ecohome investigates the latest data for new code to help make the best choice. 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)…

The Windsor Park Net Zero House in Edmonton won 2017 Canadian Green Building Award in the technical category, proving that green building a home is both possible and beautiful. As owners of this net zero energy home construction project , we acted as both the designer and general contractor. The objective for the…

The Lockeport Beach house in Nova Scotia is the residential winner of the 2017 Canadian Green Building Awards. Originally published by our print affiliate SAB Magazine Jury comments: This house has a light environmental footprint that derives from the philosophical approach taken by both the client and the…

Mark Hutchinson, Vice President of Green Building Programs at the CaGBC, speaks about the new Zero Carbon Buildings Initiative. SAB: What does the CaGBC hope to achieve with the Zero Carbon Buildings Initiative? Mark Hutchinson: The CaGBC launched the zero carbon building initiative in 2016 to champion the move to…

Follow owner/builders Sarah Cobb and William Murray as they build a home targeting both Passive House and LEED Certification. Building a Passive House that's also LEED certified This is an owner blog Ecohome posted following the personal experience of Sarah Cobb and William Murray of Rocket Construction Inc. as they…

Tiny houses, accessory dwelling units, coach homes; whatever you like to call them, we will soon see more of them popping up in Ottawa back yards. In the fall of 2015, the City of Ottawa conducted a public-consultation survey to gauge interest in a change of bylaws to allow secondary dwellings (Coach Houses or Tiny…

Why are some homes more comfortable than others? Learn about how to design a home for human comfort, which also makes for a more durable and efficient home. Have you ever noticed that at times you can feel cold in your home even though the air temperature is exactly where you like to keep it? That's…