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Here is a short video we threw together of the Passive House renovation in Harlem. The video mostly discusses the budgeting of the project. Now that the construction is for the most part done I think that our initial budget of $175/sq.ft is not sustainable. Of course it is great for the client in [...] Eco Brooklyn has partnered up with the NYC Materials Exchange Development Program, a great non-profit that keeps reusable materials out of the trash by connecting people with unwanted materials to others who can reuse them. The NYCMEDP runs a number of ongoing service, outreach, and research programs. The NYC Waste Match, for example, is [...] Gennaro Brooks-Church, Director of EcoBrooklyn Inc, discusses the significant element of salvaging materials for use in the company’s green renovations. Currently we are wrapping up a full-renovation of a brownstone in Manhattan where we’ve been working hard to attain its stringent Passive House requirements. Check out our video below, and feel free to leave [...] Check out this great article about our Eco Brooklyn’s Passive House in Harlem. GreenBuildingAdvisor.com, a great online source for building, designing, and remolding green homes, sent Richard Defendorf to our Harlem site to check out our work. Read his write-up of all the techniques we used to seal our passive house! http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/green-building-news/bringing-passivhaus-harlem [...] EcoBrooklyn Director Gennaro Brooks-Church, talks about the importance of salvaged materials which are crucial in helping achieve the company’s goal of zero or negative waste created and zero or negative new materials used. This is one of the main things that separates Eco Brooklyn from an ordinary NY contractor – finding floor joists, wood [...] Eco Brooklyn’s business model is to salvage as much as possible. We believe this is the true definition of a NY green contractor in a city with such abundant and high quality trash. We recently salvaged what we thought was marble. We cut it down to make all the bathroom and kitchen counters for [...] A typical thing happened today in the life of Eco Brooklyn. One of our workers noticed a dumpster full of wood and called it in to the office. I dispatched our “Rescue Truck”, Eco Brooklyn’s veggie oil pickup, to go salvage the wood before it was carted off to the dump. This wood has [...] Here is a photo essay of how we salvaged some flooring and reused it. We bought 15,000 square feet of herring bone style mahogany flooring from an office building. The flooring didn’t look too fancy laying in a big pile: They had glued it down previously. We then cut it to [...] We went by to check on a deck we built in Manhattan last year. It looks good! It was raining which made the deck glisten more. We made it out of salvaged Douglass fir joists from an old building. We sanded them down and oiled them up with natural oils. Check it out: [...] We just wrapped up a green roof job in East New York. Here is a photo essay from start to finish. We planted late in the year and the nights were already freezing. But we trusted the hardiness of sedum and so far they have shown to be very happy on the new roof. [...] The book Green from the Ground Up, Sustainable, Healthy, and Energy-Efficient Home Construction, offers everything its title promises, and yet that very same title shows how wrong the authors are. It is 330 pages full of intelligent “green” building techniques covering everything from efficient insulation techniques to natural ventilation. The book is a fantastic overview [...] We did two jobs over the past week on wood floors. They started out really ugly. And they ended up amazing. We finished them with 100% pure tung oil so they are really natural. The first job was to remove some paint that a previous owner, in their infinite and unfathomable intelligence, had painted [...] Here is a cool example of creative salvaging. They have taken planks from an old brownstone roof and flipped them upside down as a ceiling. The one consideration is fire. This was done in a restaurant, which means it shares the ceiling with an apartment upstairs, which means the ceiling has to be [...] I just go a call from Joel Frank, one of the three members of the Rebuilder Source cooperative in the Bronx. They accept donations of building materials and resell them at good prices. The drive behind them is mostly idealistic: one of making the world a greener place by reusing materials. He was just [...] Eco Brooklyn has one rule: we don’t buy new wood. We buy damaged wood, salvaged wood, unwanted wood, and overstock from other Brooklyn contractors. We collect it from dumpsters. But we won’t buy new wood. Period. It is the thorn in my carpenters’ side. When they are under pressure to perform (which is always), [...] We’ve been using PolyWhey Natural Wood Finish from Vermont Natural Coatings for a lot of our salvaged floors and we are very happy with their product. First of all you can apply it in a closed room without barely any smell. It is really low VOC and the VOC that is present is not [...] Here you see the Eco Brooklyn team diligently salvaging some beat up old stairs in a Brooklyn Brownstone. Along the Eco Brooklyn credo we salvage anything we can. Buying new is our last resort. But we keep in mind the cost. If it costs the same in materials and labor to salvage than [...] At Eco Brooklyn we are always looking for ways to reduce, reuse or recycle. Here is a cool thing we just discovered today. Because we refinish a lot of old wood floors, either subfloors or salvaged floors that others deemed too beaten up to keep, we do a lot of sanding. We go through [...] Since we are in the salvage and reuse business for all our building we are always on the look out to get good salvaged stuff in the New York area. Here is a great place: the Habitat ReStores. It’s not exactly in the NY area but it is close. We’ve not had the opportunity [...] Our green building company in Brooklyn, NY, has a kindred soul in Huntsville, Texas. It is called Phoenix Commotion and is run by Dan Phillips. I’ve read about him a couple times, most recently in the NY Times. He builds for lower income people and his buildings are almost totally out of trash. Yet [...] Somebody just paid us to cover up a tin ceiling! If it weren’t for the fact that we did a green roof and all sorts of other green stuff for them we would have refused. And then there are others who throw it out. And yet others who pay huge prices to get it [...] Electric conduit is hard to salvage because the scrap people get to it before it goes into the dumpster. They take it to the scrap yard for pennies on the pound. If we can get to them before they get to the yard we are happy to give them much more than what they [...] The greenest flooring option is to keep the one you have. If it is wood, then simply sand it and seal it with tung oil. It will look better than new. If it is tiles, then re-grout it and replace the cracked tiles. The exception is if it is laminate or linoleum – [...] I was on a radio show this evening called Burning Down the House in Williamsburg with Joe from Fine Lumber and Hector a furniture maker. We talked about wood, specifically salvaged wood. We started around 18 minutes into the show. I started around 25 minutes into it. Check it out here I am looking for some salvaged kitchens in Brooklyn without much luck. So I do a google search for “Brooklyn Salvaged Kitchens” and our site EcoBrooklyn.com comes up first and second in the list. Google has a sense of humor. Here is a great run down of wood types by a master carpenter, Stan Pike. Check out that page. It is cool. I found the site while researching Black Locust, an underused wood in the US. It is considered a weed pretty much so grows in abundance. It is one of the hardest woods [...] We salvaged this floor that had dark purple paint on it and it turned out to give this amazing rainbow of colors! Read on. We put it in the bathroom. Then we put Smart Strip paint remover (from Peelaway) over it to get the paint off. We could have sanding the paint [...] We have built a pergola on the green show house for solar pv and thermal. This raises it above the green roof. Green Architect Roxanne Ryce-Paul sketched up the drawings for it: It looks really great. Eco Brooklyn green builder and project manager Jack Watson built it with his crew. [...] Reclaimed Roofs has a new list of inventory. If you want a great roof they are the ones. Here is their list. An LED driver is a self-contained power supply that has outputs matched to the electrical characteristics of your LED or array of LEDs. There are currently no industry standards, so understanding the electrical characteristics of your LED or array is critical in selecting or designing a driver circuit. Drivers should be current-regulated (deliver a [...] |
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