Across the country, older houses are being demolished and replaced with dramatically larger structures that crowd the lot line. The pattern shows up in nearly every metro area with a hot housing market: a sound house comes down, a bigger one goes up, and the block changes character overnight. Trees disappear, backyards shrink, and neighbors […]
Caulk joint sealants are a small line item in a construction budget, yet they decide how long a building envelope stays watertight. When a bead fails, water finds the air barrier, insulation loses its rated performance, and occupants deal with drafts, dampness, and degraded indoor air. No one can say with certainty when a given
Greenbuild, the world’s largest conference and expo built around sustainable design, overwhelms first-time attendees with scale. Exhibitors crowd the expo floor, education sessions run in parallel all day, and the schedule fills from breakfast to late evening. Design leaders who return year after year manage the event differently: they lean on peer networks, use short-format
An attached sunspace, also called a solar greenhouse, is a glazed room built against the south side of a house. During winter days it collects solar energy and passes that heat into the living space, and through the rest of the year it works as extra room, plant nursery, or both. The idea goes back
Caulk joint sealants are a small line item in a construction budget, yet they can decide how long a building envelope stays watertight. When a sealant bead fails, water finds the air barrier, insulation loses its rated performance, and occupants deal with drafts, dampness, and degraded indoor air. The difficulty is that no one can
Green building documentation has a reputation for being tedious, and for years the reputation was earned. Teams pursuing LEED entered project data by hand into the LEED Online website, credit by credit, upload by upload. In December 2010, at Greenbuild, the U.S. Green Building Council announced a different model. LEED Automation lets teams collect documentation
Teams chasing more than one green building label have long complained that the paperwork grows faster than the building does. Every certification program wants its own evidence, its own review, and its own fee. Duplicated reports add cost and slow projects down. In November 2022, at the Greenbuild conference in San Francisco, the U.S. Green
LEED certification has always rewarded projects that document good intentions, but the Performance section asks how buildings behave after occupancy. In the LEED 2012 drafts that later became LEED v4, the U.S. Green Building Council grouped metering and commissioning requirements into one Performance section mixing new credits with familiar ones from other parts of the
LEED for Existing Buildings: Operations and Maintenance, usually shortened to LEED-EBOM, does not freeze when a rating system version ships. USGBC issues addenda, formal corrections and clarifications to the credit language and the Reference Guide, on a rolling schedule. The first batch for LEED-EBOM 2009 appeared in November 2009, and releases have continued since. Teams
The U.S. Green Building Council issues LEED addenda four times a year, and the April 2023 batch, released on April 21, 2023, aimed squarely at residential projects. The one-liner from USGBC: no major changes. Even so, the release packed in new LEED Interpretations, updates to former rulings, several Reference Guide corrections, and pilot credit updates
