The Soy House was built to showcase environmentally friendly, soy-based products used in home construction. It includes products such as spray foam insulation, soy board cabinets, soy-based adhesives, low-VOC paint, carpet backing, bathroom fixtures and foam for mattresses and furniture.

Dale Petrie, director of Strategic Development and Innovation, Grain Farmers of Ontario, says his group staged an exhibit of 101 uses for soy in December 2008 at the Toronto Stock Exchange and decided to showcase an entire home at the Royal. Because there would not have been time to construct a home from scratch, the province’s soy farmers approached modular builder Quality Homes Inc., which agreed to build the house in its factory and ship it to the fair.

“We don’t mind taking on a challenge like this at all,” says Howard Sher, executive vice-president of Quality Homes.

“And we weren’t concerned about the quality of the soy products at all. We are using the soy rigid insulation in our homes now.”

“But after the fair, the next step was, what are we going to do with this house?” says Petrie. The decision was made to offer it to a Habitat Canada affiliate.

Read the rest of the article.

Thanks Kathryn!

Roof types

There are two basic types of roof greening covers: intensive (roof gardens) and extensive. Intensive planted roofs have a greater depth of growing medium to support a wider range of planting, and often include shrubs and trees. Extensive roofs are systems with low growing plants, such as sedums, with no access other than for occasional maintenance; this type of roof is intended to be self sustaining.

There are three main methods of building up a green roof:

Inverted roof – has the insulation layer above the roof deck, on top of the waterproofing layer; usually constructed over a concrete roof deck.
Warm roof – has the insulation layer on top of the roof deck and the waterproofing layer on top of the insulation. In this system the insulation is always dry, giving a static thermal rating.
Cold roof – has the waterproofing membrane placed directly on top of the roof deck, with the insulation installed below the roof deck, or the roof may be uninsulated.

Sustainability issues

Green roofs are recognised as important in the delay of rainwater run-off entering the storm water system, and the general retention of rainwater. Other recognized environmental advantages of green roofs include:

Improved conservation and biodiversity.
Provision of new wildlife habitat.
Improved thermal insulation of buildings.
Reduction of airborne particulates.
Reduction in urban heat island effect.

Read more about green roofs here.

To a cyclist like myself this seems painfully obvious, but to people living in the world of the car I guess, well, they don’t understand and need to be told this be a real estate company.

While car parking has long been a factor considered by potential landlords, Ludlow Thompson argue, it’s important now that they also think about where would-be tenants can keep their bikes. Decent bike provision could even increase the property’s price or rental value, it effectively says.

The chain operates only in London, but the advice of the eponymous Stephen Ludlow would seem relevant to anyone thinking of letting a property in an urban area:

Cyclists are increasingly important if you intend to let or sell to the 20-35 year old post-university market. Cyclists prefer not to leave their bike chained up on the street.
When renting a flat in converted houses, cyclists often ask if they can leave their bicycle in the shared hallway. Most contracts explicitly prevent this because if often leads to damage and can upset the other tenants. By agreeing, a landlord might have the edge if a tenant is weighing up two options.
Landlords of ex-local authority and new build housing can often offer the best solution, as those properties frequently provide storage sheds which are perfect for bicycles. But landlords in other housing types can make their properties more attractive to cyclists by installing safe storage, such as a secure shed unit which will fit in even a small front garden. Landlords that are leaseholders – either in a converted house or in a more modern block – can be proactive and negotiate with other leaseholders and the freeholder to provide shared storage. There will often be a net benefit as the desirability of the property is improved.

Read the rest at the Guardian.

Students at University of Memphis have been collecting used denim for insulation in housing for Habitat for Humanity. So hang on to your old clothes so you can make somebody else’s house a little warmer.

Read more.

“It’s a project called ‘Cotton: From Blue to Green,’” explained Angie Dunlap, advisor for the student group. “The denim actually gets recycled into insulation that’s donated for housing for rebuilding communities.”

Many of those communities were hit by Hurricane Katrina, and many of the homes will be built by Habitat for Humanity, explained Brad Robb, vice president of communications for the Cotton Board.

“[The recycled cotton] is environmentally friendly,” said Robb, whose organization works with the program. “Not only is it just as good as regular insulation, you don’t have to use gloves. It’s not itchy, so that’s a plus.”

He said recycled cotton adds up to a lot of insulation.

“[It takes] roughly about 500 average size jeans for an average size house, around 1600 feet,” Robb explained.

$20 million invested in the company from the American government may equal up to $5 billion in revenue for Dow Chemical (best known for the horrible Bhopal disaster they committed) by 2015.

Reuters has some more on the product.

The new product is the latest advance in “Building Integrated Photovoltaic” (BIPV) systems, in which power-generating systems are built directly into the traditional materials used to construct buildings.

BIPV systems are currently limited mostly to roofing tiles, which operate at lower efficiencies than solar panels and have so far been too expensive to gain wide acceptance.

Dow’s shingle will be about 30 to 40 percent cheaper than current BIPV systems.

The Dow shingles can be installed in about 10 hours, compared with 22 to 30 hours for traditional solar panels, reducing the installation costs that make up more than 50 percent of total system prices.

The product will be rolled out in North America through partnerships with home builders such as Lennar Corp (LEN.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Pulte Homes Inc (PHM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) before marketing is expanded, Palmieri said.

Dow received $20 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to help develop its BIPV products.

The intuitive view of most people might be that building green is going to be vastly more expensive and complex than building to the most basic standards required by local code. It follows that we assume affordable housing probably isn’t going to be green. But a recent article in the Communities and Banking magazine published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (FSB) this spring busts the myth that affordable housing and green housing are opposite and mutually exclusive concepts.

The myth doesn’t hold up locally either. We’ve looked at a study of green housing and the energy savings it creates for residents of the Seattle Housing Authority. And in Portland the Housing Authority built its first HOPE VI project green as well. We’ve also looked at the study of housing and health where there is growing evidence that along with materials the location of housing can have an effect on resident’s health – and health care costs. And we’ve considered the savings that building green can create for schools and their communities.

In a nutshell, tiny houses give you back freedom in the form of time, money, and peace of mind. Why? How? Simply because they cost less to own, clean, heat, cool, etc. The less money you spend on your home the less you have to earn or the more you keep in the bank. The less time you spend cleaning and maintaining your house the more time you have to for the things you like to do.
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This blog is simply going to focus on making the mental transition to living lighter and smaller. I’ll also post ideas I have for house design, hence the name. I’m not an architect but I am a designer and who knows, maybe someday, when I have enough time, I’ll go back and get a Master’s in Architecture… just for fun of course. But for now I’ll draw tiny pictures of tiny houses and post them online.

Thanks, Trevor!

In 2002, the city of Amsterdam had a very urgent need for student housing and was looking for new and original ideas to quickly solve the problem. Only temporary building sites were available (as in any city, land was scarce), so the solution had to be mobile, affordable and had to have a quick set up time. Traditional construction was not going to work: too expensive, not mobile, and too slow. Tempohousing (at the time also known as “Keetwonen”) was the only company who could offer solutions with the budgets and timeframes. But to live in what looks like a shipping container was completely new in Holland, so many hearts still had to be won.