Building Houses

• Plan a fundraiser dinner and sell tickets at the door
• Choose a community member in need of a deck or home repair of some kind
• Choose an area of town that needs a clean up
• Find a youth or recreational organization that needs a new structure
• Stage a bake sale, clothes drive, food drive
• Fix a door
• Replace an electrical box
• Clean up a public place
• Repair a fence
• Paint a house
• Repair a window
• Donate bikes to needy kids
• Bring meals to seniors who need a home cooked meal
• Offer to play music and entertain all these wonderful, giving people
• Make a donation of materials or dollars toward materials

Building Houses

Interior Design

Interior Design

1. Use less water! Take showers instead of baths, fix leaks, and turn off the tap when brushing your teeth. And buy efficient fixtures by looking for the WaterSense label.

Interior Design

Interior Design

Perhaps you’ve heard of the newest alternative to traditional gravel and bark mulch – glass. That’s right, recycled glass is now a popular landscaping choice with numerous benefits.

Glass mulch looks like colorful gravel and comes in a variety of colors. The mulch is made from recycled glass debris which is tumbled to remove sharp edges, making it safe for children and animals, and beautiful for planters, gardens, and around trees.

Design options are endless, as the glass mulch can be coordinated to match your home’s architectural style and colors or create an outdoor living space with a specific theme (for instance, blue glass mulch is very popular for simulating water).

In addition to using recycled material, glass much carries other environmental benefits: it lessens the impact on landfills, conserves water and withstands heavy drainage without washing out, requires very little maintenance, and does not need to be replaced every year like traditional mulch does.

Some popular applications in residential architecture? Landscaping, terrazzo flooring, counter top applications, water features, fire pits, and hundreds more!

Interior Design

On Earth Hour hundreds of millions of people, organizations, corporations and governments around the world will come together to make a bold statement about their concern for climate change by doing something quite simple—turning off their lights for one hour. In the U.S. where we are already feeling the impacts of climate change, Earth Hour sends a clear message that Americans care about this issue and want to turn the lights out on dirty air, dangerous dependency on foreign oil and costly climate change impacts, and make the switch to cleaner air, a strong economic future and a more secure nation.

Interior Design

The question is: how rapidly will this market grow in the United States?

I have seen promising signs here in America. Green jobs, for instance, are growing 2.5 times as fast as traditional jobs. But there is another indicator as well: the enormous sense of possibility that is spreading across the country. Everywhere I go I meet people who want to design, invest in, or build the next wave of clean energy technology.

I have talked with researchers at MIT who are fired up to create the next generation of hybrid car batteries. I have met with green entrepreneurs in Ohio who are converting windshield factories to make solar panels. And I have heard from steel workers in Indiana who want to revive America’s industrial heartland by manufacturing wind turbines.

These people are doing what America has always done well: leveraged our ingenuity to become technological leaders.

But there is no guarantee that we will retain our leadership when it comes to clean energy. Germany and Spain have long been leaders in clean energy, but now China has created stringent fuel-efficiency rules for vehicles and strong renewable energy standards. It is also reportedly preparing plans to invest between $440 billion and $660 billion in the next 10 years on alternative energy development. India’s cabinet meanwhile, just approved a bold plan for generating 20,000 megawatts from solar energy by 2022.

America has yet to take similar action. We remain dependent on dirty fossil fuels that endanger our national security and escalate the costs of curbing global warming.

The best way to secure a place in the global clean energy market is through smart policies. We need government incentives to get technologies out of the lab and into the marketplace, and we need pollution-reduction targets to increase demand for cleaner options.

The most powerful tool we have for accomplishing this is a law that puts a price on global warming pollution and directs investment into clean energy alternatives. Such a law will give businesses an incentive to invest in things like hybrid technology and highly efficient heating and cooling equipment, and it will reward consumers for buying more efficient appliances and better insulated homes.

The businesses supplying these low-carbon solutions will experience dramatic growth. NRDC’s experts say that contractors who can successfully manage commercial-scale green-building projects have more work than they can handle. The same will soon be true for energy auditors, smart grid engineers, green architects, and hybrid battery designers.

Read the whole article here.

interior decoratinghouse construction

Interior Decoration

Sunrooms and three-season porches

Patios and decks

Terraces and courtyards

Pergolas and Gazebos

Cooking areas and fireplaces

Docks and water access

Walkways and paths

Gardens and landscaping

Outdoor spaces enhance the living areas and interior of the home. Talk to your architect in the beginning stages of your home design to incorporate them into your home plan.

interior decoration

Interior Decoration

We’re greening up our new office by replacing the incandescent light bulbs with Earthmate energy saving bulbs. By using Earthmate bulbs, we will use an average of 75% less electricity, help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

For instance, we replaced our 45 watt overhead bulbs with Earthmate 8-watt Dimmable Reflector Bulbs, which will save us about $61 and last up to 7 times longer than our standard light bulbs. And bonus: they come with a 9-year warranty!

If you are looking for a great, long-lasting, energy efficient light bulb, learn more about Earthmate's products and company philosophy. We like their packaging, too, made from 100% post-consumer waste.

Interior Decoration

With utility-scale wind project developers cash-strapped and unable to obtain financing for large wind farms, small wind power project developers see a window of opportunity. by Sarah Lozanova, Contributor Wisconsin, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com]

Very few large-scale wind projects are able to obtain financing under the current economic climate. But falling turbine, steel and labor prices have created the perfect environment for mid-scale wind energy projects to thrive. Although total new installed capacity in 2009 may not rival the impressive 8,900 MW installed in North America in 2008, a golden opportunity exists for smaller wind development.

Small wind projects range in size from 100 kW to 30 MW and typically serve schools, farms, rural villages, businesses and municipal utility companies. Because these type of installations can access funding from various sources, they are less vulnerable to the credit crisis than their large-scale wind farm counterparts.

With the economic crisis taking its toll on wind energy development in 2009, large turbine manufacturers are paying more attention to the mid-scale market, giving smaller projects greater accessibility to utility-grade turbines.

Incentives for Small Wind Project Development

U.S. government support for wind energy through net-metering laws and an extension of the renewable energy production and investment tax credits offers stability to the industry, while stimulus funding provides a boost. In addition to the $1.6 billion in CREBs that is available to state and local governments, municipal utility companies and rural electric cooperatives, some state or local governments also offer grant or rebate programs.

Such incentives make wind projects more attractive, as do lower commodity and labor costs. “We’re already seeing manufacturers come back and say, ‘The steel prices have come down so much that the tower is now $100,000 cheaper,’” says -- Wes Slaymaker, of WES Engineering. “Since the economic collapse in late 2008, steel prices have come down at least 50 percent. The cost of labor has also come down because there are a lot of contractors looking for work.”

While these factors also benefit large wind projects, the financing difficulties that are plaguing the industry now have made it harder for large wind developers to take advantage of them so smaller developers, with greater access to capital, can step right in.

This special window of opportunity for smaller projects will not last forever. Although some encouraging factors will remain, the large-scale wind industry is likely to pick up as soon as liquidity returns to the market.

Although 2009 may be a year to survive for some players in the wind industry, it presents a golden opportunity for the mid-scale market. Time will tell if this opening will result in a boom in this segment of the industry. “If this opportunity for smaller projects is successful, we will start seeing the turbines ordered this year for projects to be installed later in the year or in 2010,” says Slaymaker. “It sounds like there are a number of small to mid-size projects working towards turbine purchase right now.”

Interior Decoration

Interior Decoration

In the United States, approximately 40% of energy consumption is attributed to non-industrial buildings (residential) and 32% is in heating & cooling alone – it’s staggering! The global climate, carbon dioxide, natural resource depletion and increasing energy demands are all relevant and of great concern.

If you wish to have the largest effect for the smallest effort & investment, work with an experienced architect to design and build a better insulated home with durable, low maintenance materials, more efficient heating and cooling systems, utilize natural day-lighting and perhaps even harness some of the available solar energy to produce hot water or even electricity in a solar power home. Look into geothermal and wind power. Small steps in aggregate will have a significant impact.

The result will be enormous to the environment. Better yet, your green home will be healthy and you’ll spend far less on energy bills, building maintenance, and material replacement costs.

interior decoration

Interior Decoration

The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards defines the role of an Architect as "the primary building professional qualified to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public through the enhancement of the quality of the built environment and the richness of space and form”. Buildings inhabited during those functions are essential to our lives and our health. Architects are ethically bound to continually better that built environment.


For instance, Architecture entails more than just a physical building. It involves:

· Correctly interpreting the client’s dreams, visions, and objectives
· Exploring all possibilities
· Studying and responding to the site and its environment
· And translating all these into a home design that will exceed expectations

Sustainable architecture or green building is only a small part of a greater whole. It has been said many times that “sustainability” is a good short term goal for home design. Sustainability is simply the equilibrium, a tipping point where we are no longer damaging the planet that we inhabit with the effects of our daily lives through manufacturing, power production, construction, transportation, agriculture which affect our global ecosystem. Sustainability, by definition, is actually the point at which we cease to harm the environment. Beyond sustainability is where we begin to repair the damage done, which, ultimately, is the goal.

There are many great minds working toward both of these goals with ideas and solutions far greater than most people’s typical reach; however, anything that can be done better and is financially feasible should be done.

Green architects enrich the design and the project through integrity, conscientious design, environmental awareness, and the application of skills specific to their trade – keeping the ultimate goals of energy efficiency and sustainability clearly in view. Should your home design be anything less?