Do You Need A Remodeling General Contractor for Your Remodeling Job?
Five reasons why it is a good idea to hire a general contractor for remodeling your home.
Stearns Design Build Opens Custom Cabinet Shop
College Station, TX, Stearns Design Build, a local residential remodeling company, has announced that they are now offering furniture grade cabinets to the general public. For some time, Stearns Design Build has built high-quality custom cabinet for their remodeling clients. In a desire to better control quality in cabinetry Stearns Design Build started building
Brick and Other Exterior Masonry: Not a Great Choice for Our hot humid climate
In this project, we used wood and brick siding to not only promote green building, but to also reduce the thermal mass of the house, to cool the temperature of the home. Don’t you love the look of Austin stone on a home? Many neighborhoods in Bryan and College Station require a high percentage
Bringing Thermal Mass Inside
Thermal Mass in Fireplaces can help store heat in the winter and maintain cool ambient temperatures in the summer. In a previous post, we discussed the importance of using thermal mass inside a home in a hot humid climate like that in Bryan and College Station. This time we will talk about home
Thermal Mass in Hot Humid Climates
This is a visual of the effect thermal mass has on your home. Here in College Station and Bryan we have a very hot and humid climate, which presents a unique set of design and construction challenges. For one, traditional approaches to thermal mass walls are out for us. However, this potentially beautiful design
Pruning Bushes and Trees
As a general practice, we do not include yard work in our maintenance list but this is one that impacts the health and durability of your house. Tree branches rubbing or falling on the house can do a tree-mendous amount of damage. Vines growing on the house can also do damage. It is a good idea to do this chore early in February before spring starts to set in but once the worst of winter has passed.
How to Choose the Right Siding for Your Home
Like many building products in existence, choosing the right siding for your home is never as easy as Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Each siding material comes with its own set of features and benefits, both from a sustainability point of view, price, climate appropriateness, and aesthetics. Sadly there is no category wide certification program to use as an overall guide. The first decision for choosing a siding material should come down to what is most suitable and allowable in your market or area of residence. Here is a list of commonly used siding for green-built homes.
Therapeutic Landscape Network
I recently had the pleasure of meeting Naomi Sacks, who runs the Therapeutic Landscape Network. She is currently working on a PhD in Architecture here at TAMU. But her accomplishments exceed that of many who have long had such academic di...stinction. Her book, Therapeutic Landscapes: An Evidence-Based Approach to Designing Healing Gardens and Restorative Outdoor Spaces, is available on Amazon. Though Naomi's focus is on landscape design in institutional settings, I look forward to learning as much as I can about her approach and applying it to the residential setting.
Biophilia
To the extent that we seek “green” or sustainable solutions, it is not enough to consider the resources that we use in building, we must consider our relationship to all resources. We must design homes that put us into relationship with life’s resources so that we can become aware of our part of a process of dynamic balance.
SITING A HOUSE
It is easy to get caught up in all of the new building materials and technologies that are available and lose sight of the important fundamentals such as properly siting a house. There are few things that will make more difference in terms of energy use than this. The predominant paradigm in what some refer
