Peelaway paint remover is the best I know of. It really does a great job. You need to apply it thick, like so thick you can’t see the wood under it. Let it sit a day or so and then gently scrape it off. Wash with soap and water and the wood is there. Really […]
I went to check out the new park at the Ikea store in Red Hook. Really nice. They planted some great local species and it looks great. Really a nice park by the ocean. The above picture isn’t exactly what most people would see if the went to the park. But if you are foraging
As part of our National Sustainable Building Adviser Course we visited the Queens Botanical Garden. It is amazing. The new building is totally decked out with the best of green building: solar, rainwater, gray water, toilet composting, natural vantialtion. You name it. But their greatest thing for me was their green roof. Really amazing. [salbumphotos=27,160,3,n,y,title
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Brooklyn NY brownstones are not built to carry heavy loads on their roofs. So when you install a green roof you need to build for it and know what the weights are. Here are the numbers from my friend Avra: Extensive – 10-50 lb/squ. ft Semi-intensive 30-90lb/sq. ft. Intensive 80-150 lb/sq. ft. Here are thicknesses
Weights of green roofs Read More »
Great Kitchens is a special edition magazine put out by Taunton. They do the Fine Homebuilding mag. Great Kitchens is a good source of kitchen ideas. The one thing is that if you are renovating a kitchen in Brooklyn and NY your sense of scale is way off. They had a section on “Small Kitchens”
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Our Brooklyn Green Show House has doubled up joists in the roof in anticipation of a heavy green roof. I’m talking with my friends Atom and Lori, who are publishing a book on DYI green roofs in Brooklyn. We are seeing if they can install the roof on the show house as part of their
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This natural Building Colloguium, hosted by Peaceweavers, I really think is great. No continuing education credits. No high-power, big-project architectural, engineering, interior designing firm reps to hobnob with. No suits, no ties, no shiny shoes. Sleep in a tent, eat vegan food. Learn about things like strawbale, cob, cordwood, timber framing, straw-clay infill, permaculture, community-supported
Northeast (U.S.) Natural Building & Living Colloquium Read More »
GreenRoofs.org is my favorite green roof resource on the web. Run by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities the web site is full of useful info. If you ever wanted to put a green roof on your New York home then that should be the first place to look. When we are researching the best way
The web site and group called Clean Gowanus Now! has a url of .org, which leads you to think it is a non proffit with community based objectives. But the site and the group are a scam. The group has these following entities behind it: Africa-Israel, U.S.A. (Involved with the Scarano creation at 340 Bond
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This just out: Green Business is Booming. I agree. Eco Brooklyn is getting almost more jobs than we can handle. From the wire: The Pew Charitable Trusts has conducted the first-ever hard count across all 50 states of the actual jobs, companies and venture capital investments that supply the growing market demand for environmentally friendly
Pew study: Green Jobs Growing More Than 2x as Fast as All Other Jobs Read More »
