Our blogs feature all things home remodeling, design and build with wide-flung interpretation. Here we cover design concepts for kitchens, bathrooms, and home additions. We also cover green building, building science and building materials. In the wider-flung reaches we cover urban design, the psychology of happiness and celebrations of those things. We are also happy to take and answer your questions.
Check out the recent articles written about us:
Your Impact on Energy Use: Tip #4 Conserve Water
Bathroom remodel in Bryan / College Station, by Stearns
Your Impact on Energy Use:Tip #3 Savvy Appliance Use
This week long blog series is to help you understand how your choices effect the efficiency of your home. It will take a look at a breakdown of annual energy use in an average home and offer suggestions about how you can reduce your overall use in each category. Today we discuss appliance use, and how you can save money and energy even with older appliances.
Your Impact on Energy Use: Tip #1 Plug Loads
This week long blog series is to help you understand how your choices effect the efficiency of your home. It will take a look at a breakdown of annual energy use in an average home and offer suggestions about how you can reduce your overall use in each category. Today we start by looking at plug loads.
Bringing in Daylight: Light Shelves
Home addition in Bryan / College Station, by Stearns
Bringing in Daylight: Skylights
Another way to bring more natural light into a space
Bringing in Daylight: Clerestories
Whole home remodel in Bryan / College Station, by
Shading Windows to Reduce Home Heat Gain
Windows on the East, West, and South side of your home receive direct sunlight throughout the day and can cause your home to gain unwanted heat. During the colder winter, some of this heat might be welcome, but you definitely want to keep it out during the hot summer. Overhangs and awnings are green building solutions that achieve this result. Plus, nature has another solution that utilizes trees and plants to shade windows. What are the benefits of each of these ideas?
Three Why’s Behind Green Building
There are lots of reasons to consider bringing green techniques and ideas into your new home design or your existing home’s remodel. A lot of times the most discussed ones are about saving money or saving the planet—but, today we’d like to focus on three that center on what green building really comes down to: improving your quality of life!
Selecting the Correct Window: Efficient Characteristics
So, what are defining characteristics of window types? The main distinctions in windows include the number and type of glass panes, as well as any coatings on the glass pane.
Selecting the Correct Window: Learning from Labels
It’s great that there are so many options of high efficiency windows that you can choose from. This makes saving energy and increasing the comfort of your home all that much easier to do. Though, easier might not seem like the right word when you’re staring at a vast array of windows. But, there are labels with information on each window to help you not feel overwhelmed or out of the loop when you and your contractor are selecting upgraded windows to install.
Defining Green Products
As more and more green products develop, it becomes harder to compare them and choose between them. What does it even mean when a product is “green”? And what qualities should you look for when selecting products for your home? The following are some green product criteria that we felt would help clarify what really makes a product green.
Developing Green Products: Flame Retardants
Today’s blog is a shout out about a flame retardant product that is being developed and tested at Texas A&M. It’s made from natural and renewable resources: layers of clay and a polymer from crab shells. These layers are designed to help prevent a fire from igniting a surface instead of trying to extinguish it after ignition like most fire retardants.
Learning from the Past: Additions & Reuse
Our green building tip-from-the-past for today is that a local material available to you is your existing home. In the past, families built on to their homes, or adapted certain room functions to make the building usable and comfortable as they grew. You can similarly be sustainable through managing and improving your “home resource” to ensure it continues to be your present sanctuary while having the ability to be available for future generations.
Learning from the Past: Local Materials
Today’s glance at the past to help with green building in the present is more about a building ideology than a building type. When most people built their homes and businesses a hundred years ago, they didn’t order bamboo flooring that took months to cross the pacific from Asia. Instead, they used the materials readily available around them. And we can do the same.
