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Calgary Modern Energy Efficient House Built on a Reverse Walkout
A modern energy-efficient house design was a key requirement for this new home in Calgary by Alloy Homes. A key challenge was its reverse walkout design.

A Passive House Plus Certified House Built In Brooklyn
Renovating to Passive House Plus standard creates a beautiful and low maintenance home in Brooklyn, NY. The home is warm in winter without standard HVAC.

Blu Homes Prefab Home Manufacturer Retreats From Canada (and everywhere but California)
Update as of October 29, 2019. I contacted Blu Homes this week to see if they were still offering to build homes in Canada. This is the response they sent me: We are currently not serving your geography and only available to build in California. If you do own land in...

VANGUARD Kitchen Designers
I think it is time to refresh the term and our perception of Kitchen Designers and award proper recognition to the modern, progressively unconventional, VANGUARD Kitchen Designers of today, and tomorrow's. To do this, I dare to differentiate Vanguard Kitchen Designers...

Living walls can benefit your community and local environment
Living walls, or plant walls, provide a way to clean the air around them and can be used inside or outside to clean the air and provide moisture.

Canada’s Greenest Home — One Year Later
Usually once a home is built, the builder hands the keys over to the new owner and unless there's a problem, the builder moves on to the next project. However, in the case of a straw-bale built home in Peterborough, the home has been lived in for the past year and all...

mobEE Strawbale School Portables are a low impact breath of fresh air
A school portable made from straw bale offers the following benefits: energy efficiency, low maintenance and clean indoor air.

Norpolhaus – A Polish Prefab Passive House Builder
A prefab house that’s also passivehaus certified. Built in Poland, it can be shipped almost anywhere.

Greener Yet Stylish Ways to Renovate Your Kitchen
This is a guest post by Robert Kramer. The modern kitchen is a very high-tech, power-hungry part of the household, but that doesn’t mean that it has to hurt the environment. As our homes improve and the world around us suffers, people are turning to greener solutions...
Kitchen Renovation is Complete — Finally!!
A Montreal kitchen renovation tries to incorporate as many green features as possible, including low VOC cabinets, local maple hardwood flooring and quartz countertops.

A “Green” Kitchen Renovation
The current version of our kitchen in our new-to-us 1928 house has a Band-Aid solution going on -- you can tell that they were going to get to the kitchen eventually, but they ran out of time, money or patience (renovations will do that to you). They put nice...

Canada’s Greenest Home is Complete!
Chris Magwood, Executive Director of The Endeavour Centre sent me a note letting me know that Canada's Greenest Home is now complete and up for sale. As he mentions in his blog post on the subject, being the greenest home is not a brag per se, as those people working...

A Tour of Maison de Développement Durable, Equiterre’s Headquarters
Highlights from the certified LEED Platinum Centre for Sustainable Development in Montreal, QC.
Solar Decathlon 2013 Entrant: Team Alberta
In a previous post I wrote about the Solar Decathlon, created and hosted by the US Department of Energy every two years. In October, 2013, the next competition will take place between 20 teams chosen from entries by post secondary institutions from around the world....

A Green Reno Can be Easier Than You Think
There are a lot of decisions to make when you renovate. From the design of the space to the finishing materials, you want a house that works for you and your family. Working with an architect or a designer can help, but ultimately you have to decide what...
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