We have these old rickety stairs in the show house. They are good craftsmanship but have had to endure a hundred years of big Italian boys bouncing up and down them. And they are old, old and tired. We need to keep them, though, because the space is too steep and windy to be accepted …
Our budget for the Brooklyn green show house got decimated with this banking crisis. So we don’t really have a budget any more. It is basically as cheap as we can make it. For our kitchens for example we were going to buy salvaged kitchens, make them in house out of salvaged wood or find …
Quality is tied to quality and no longer tied to price Read More »
I think the New York and Brooklyn brownstones are ideal candidates for green renovations. They have all the ingredients that make for an easy and powerful green overhaul. I can’t list them without sounding like a sales pitch, but it’s more pride of Brooklyn than me trying to sell anything. Greenest Beautiful Brownstone Firstly the …
Here are some good PowerPoint from different trainings from the NYC Dept of sustainable Design. You can get a pretty good idea of the course from the slides. Last time I checked they had interesting material on: Energy Efficiency in New York City Energy Efficient & Quality Lighting Architectural Daylighting in New York City Commissioning …
Here is a good general check list to keep in mind when building: Sustainable Site Results Stormwater run-off reduced Alternate transportation nearby Urban Heat Island Effect mitigated Nighttime light pollution reduced Strategies Native drought-resistant plantings; permeable paving Light-colored, high-reflectance, low-emissivity roofing Skylights and windows screened to limit bothersome light escape at night Urban setting near …
Some people say a hot water return on the hot water lines of a house saves energy. A hot water return is where the hot water supply pipe (for example to the sink) actually loops back to the boiler so that hot water is constantly flowing in the pipe and ready to be used. This …
New York recently approved the use of PVC as drain pipes. PVC is considered very “not green”, mostly because it basically takes forever to decompose, so it sits around in landfills for hundreds of years. Or it gets burned and lets off all sorts of nasty chemicals. From a practical point it is also much …
Everyone and their mother is getting LEED certified. Remember the story about Rockefeller overhearing his shoe shine boy talking about stocks? This prompted Rockefeller to conclude that the market had reached a bubble and was about to collapse. He took all his money out of the market just before it crashed. Now I’m seeing the …
This is more a technical point but something worth considering when using materials. For example the “problem” with recycled cellulose is that it is degraded. There is a green term for this but I forgot it. Basically you are taking a higher purpose material – newspaper that is used to transport knowledge – and degrading …
