Earth-Friendly Home Renovations: A Local Perspective

Earth friendly. Eco conscious. Green. What do these terms mean in the context of home improvement? The short answer is being kind to your surroundings — although the meanings can differ slightly depending on where you live.

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What Can You Learn From a Brick?

Fake Rolex

The brick is an iconic building element to those of us who live on the East Coast, where old cities are built from millions and millions of red bricks. Therefore, a brick seems like a good place to start when considering what it costs the environment to build a house. In fact, readers may remember an article previously posted on our fake Rolex website, entitled “New Construction Pollutes!” In that post, we asked folks to speculate about the size of the carbon footprint made by the bricks used to build an average-sized Philadelphia rowhome.

We explained that to make just one brick, 1.4 pounds of carbon is burned and released into the atmosphere.

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We Toured Post Greens’ Skinny House Project

Last Friday, Tamara and I were invited out by Chuck Weiss, project manager for Post Green, to check out their Skinny House Project. You can learn more about that project here: Skinny House

We are really excited by Post Green’s innovative build process and we look forward to learning more from them. Their main approach to their home efficiency ratings (which are very high!) is a focus on air sealing.

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The Sexy Side of Home Insulation

This post is a continuation of my blog post about the truly sexy stuff that goes on behind your walls. I’ve been writing about these topics because we have been getting lots of calls from folks who are focused only on the shiny bits of their projects. The fact is, the shiny bits are not where the true value of a project lies, even if they are fun to use.

By the time most of our customers call us, they have spent many hours eyeing expensive, flashy items like new kitchen cabinets, high-gloss tile, chrome fixtures, and all the other glitzy things that go into a project. They can even quote the prices and technical features of these items. But the fact is, these are just the cherry on the sundae, the icing on the cake. They are “the fun stuff” that comes at the end of a complicated mix of science and art we apply to every single project we take on. 

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