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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

Stop me if you heard this before. It was anything but easy when we tried this the last time.1 Not because it was hard, but because we didn’t know what we were doing.It is amazing to me that most… Read More

 Our story starts with a self-important politician taking a shower in a new home in Las Vegas in the mid 1990’s and ends with ten’s of thousands of houses with leaks and litigation. Our story will… Read More

How did we get here? Where are we going? Fundamental questions that should be asked as they tell us who we are. I am of course talking about walls. Wood frame walls are pretty impressive… Read More

Unfortunately, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, at least as far as building science is concerned, because what happens in Vegas from a building science perspective is rather good. Two of the… Read More

North of the Arctic Circle there are only two seasons—this winter and last winter. Who would ever want to live there? Being human, we can’t help ourselves. We’ve been there a long time. And, we are… Read More

After one hundred and fifty years the Illinois cottage1 is undergoing some pretty interesting changes and the ghosts of George Washington Snow and Augustine Taylor2 are cautiously eyeing the result.… Read More