Retrofit / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

Crawlspace insulation - be careful to get it right A crawlspace comes with all the downsides of a basement, but it is just too low a space to be functional either beyond the folded plastic christmas tree and a couple of boxes of baubles. Unless there is a good reason for it, going through the process of pouring a footi...

Construction is a dirty business, and living in a home under renovation can aggravate asthma and other respiratory illnesses, it can also lead to issues developing that people didn't suffer from before. Air that is full of dust and chemicals can cause respiratory irritations even among adults who don't suffer from such...

As a precursor to a new post exploring everything you wanted to know about Dry Rot but were afraid to ask, we wanted to cover the causes, effects and solutions for interstitial condensation in walls and roofs. We’ve all heard of condensation, but has anyone ever heard of interstitial condensation? If you haven’t (or ev...

Ice dams form at the bottom of roofs, letting water penetrate and cause damage to the interior of walls and roofs.  When snow melts on a roof it runs down until it meets the unheated bottom edge of a roof and then freezes. This chunk of ice is called an ice dam, and it can cause water to backup beneath shingles and Ice...