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Double Rubble Toil and Trouble1“When you insulate your basement on the inside, the rubble foundation will freeze apart, and you will get swelling from the freezing soil collapsing the wall, and… Read More

Hospitals are not fun places to work in, and they are not fun places to build and design or to fix and repair. The stakes are often high. Nothing is more sobering than when someone dies because of a… Read More

I love cellulose insulation.1 In fact, I love all insulations. The more insulation, the better. There is no such thing as a bad insulation, only bad applications.2 But, it irritates the… Read More

Blue Hawaii[1]Hawaii is a magnificent place – except if you want to build there.  Huh?  What’s so difficult about building on islands in the middle of the Pacific?  Check out… Read More

It’s pretty easy to deal with new basements. They are not hard to insulate. The majority of them do not leak or smell and the buildings on top of them are generally not rotting.1 If you want a… Read More

Canadians do live in igloos. Unlike the Inuit snow block version they’re typically taller than 10 stories and they are made out of foam. Insulated Concrete Forms (ICF’s) are beginning to come into… Read More

Folks are always asking – “how come we seem to have so many problems with buildings today?” We never seemed worry about rot, corrosion and mold before. What’s going on? What’s different? Is it… Read More

Sheathing does more than deal with wind. Sometimes it doesn’t even deal with that. It wasn’t always that way. We didn’t even used to have sheathing. We had a timber structural frame (or not,… Read More

Spain gave Florida to the United States in exchange for the United States giving up any claims on Texas. We all know how that turned out. Nobody really wanted to live there except the Seminoles until… Read More

Little things can be big things. You build things that seem like they are obviously going to work and then the real world intrudes and reminds you that you are not as smart as you think. You then… Read More