I found this great survey on toilets. Veritec, a testing company, tested 700 toilets for flush power, water savings, bowl size, flapper size etc. Now this might not excite most people but when you are looking for the most water efficient toilet that also actually flushes everything down this study is amazing. 13th-edition-full-toilet-veritec-report It shows …
Green Toilet Survey Shows Not All Toilets Are Created Equal Read More »
We had to get a delivery but a car was in the way. So we moved it!
We wanted some siding for a wall we built. So we used some 100 year old joists. We took the joists and cut them into long strips. Then we sealed them on both sides so they don’t warp. Then we put them onto strips that we had attached to the wall. This way there is …
We are building a green roof on the show house. Green roofs are heavy so we are paying a lot of attention to the weight on the roof. We were going to lay the green roof materials directly on top of the tar roof that was there. It was in good shape. But the we …
I’m trying to design some stairs. They are from the basement to the cellar. You enter on the side and it spirrals to the right 90 degrees then follows the wall down. Once it reaches the cellar floor it spirals to the right again 45 degrees. Below is a diagram of it. The cool thing …
One thing brownstones have in abundance are bricks. And I keep seeing dumpsters full of them. It is heartbreaking for me. These are beautiful bricks, a hundred years old, with character and texture. Here is one job site where they knocked down the whole building. There were thousands of perfect bricks. The next day they …
We found about 500sq.ft. of 5 inch wide maple plank flooring in a dumpster. It had a very slight warp to it due to it not being installed correctly. But with a little sanding we could get rid of that. So we happily installed the flooring. Despite our good intentions there were complications 1. Maple …
The magic of thermal heating is amazing. on one side you can use thermal mass to heat and on the other you can use the lack of thermal mass to also heat. Combine of Thermal Mass And you can even combine the two. For example you could have a low mass sun room, with just …
Here is an image of the proposed plumbing setup for the green show house in Brooklyn. Chester Birchwood from New York Solar Systems is installing it. It has three interesting components. These apply to hot water only since we are really managing the amount of energy we added to the hot water. The cold water …
I am really enjoying the renovation of a one hundred year old building. As I uncover layers of material I come across the craftsmanship of the builders from a hundred years ago. This house has not had a such an in depth renovation since it was first built in 1908. I connect to these builders. …
