What does a "green" home look like? What are its characteristics, and how can you ensure that you meet the highest green standards within a given budget? The answers to these questions and more are found in The Green Home, a book dedicated to teaching builders and homeowners alike about environmentally-friendly residential construction. This highly practical resource explores the very latest construction techniques, materials, processes, and green practices that will reduce the environmental impact of the building itself. Coverage ranges from air sealing measures and energy efficient practices to water conservation and the usage of natural materials, with a special focus on complying with zoning ordinances and building codes. With thorough explanations of the many benefits of green building, this is the perfect "nuts and bolts" guide to environmentally-sound homes.
Showing posts with label Guide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guide. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 04, 2011
The Green Home: A Decision Making Guide for Owners and Builders
What does a "green" home look like? What are its characteristics, and how can you ensure that you meet the highest green standards within a given budget? The answers to these questions and more are found in The Green Home, a book dedicated to teaching builders and homeowners alike about environmentally-friendly residential construction. This highly practical resource explores the very latest construction techniques, materials, processes, and green practices that will reduce the environmental impact of the building itself. Coverage ranges from air sealing measures and energy efficient practices to water conservation and the usage of natural materials, with a special focus on complying with zoning ordinances and building codes. With thorough explanations of the many benefits of green building, this is the perfect "nuts and bolts" guide to environmentally-sound homes.
Affordable Housing: A Resource Guide to Alternative and Factory-Built Homes, New Technologies, and the Owner Builder Option
Computerizing the estimating process can help remodelers double their estimating productivity while increasing accuracy. The right software package can also make it easier to revise cost estimates and keep track of running costs. Modeled after the CAD Reference Guide For Residential Construction, this book is written to help you choose the right computer estimating software package for your company. It guides you through the steps of selecting and implementing an estimating system, introduces you to takeoff and analytical tools available from most programs and gives you practical tips that will help you increase productivity. Includes profiles of estimating software packages, a glossary of terms and an estimating software buyer's checklist. From Home Builder Press, 1998, 98 pp.
Monday, October 03, 2011
Basic Business Management: A Guide for Small Volume Home Builders
Learn how to obtain financing, control costs, ensure consistent quality standards, and more effectively manage your employees and trade contractors. You’ll find out how to identify market and industry trends that will yield business opportunities. Whether you are just starting your small-volume building business or you want to refine your current business practices, Basic Business Management will provide you with management guidance you can use to improve your efficiency and profitability.Green from the Ground Up: Sustainable, Healthy, and Energy-Efficient Home Construction (Builder's Guide)
A thorough, informative, and up-to-date reference on green, sustainable and energy-efficient home construction that clarifies definitions of green and sustainable and guides builders and architects through the process of new or remodel green construction, including issues of site, landscaping, durability, and energy-efficiency. It starts with clear explanations of the concepts and fundamentals of green, healthy and energy-efficient construction and walks the reader through the entire construction process, injecting expert advice at every decision point. Construction techniques, materials, and products are thoroughly explained, making the often vaguely understood concepts cleanly understandable. The book gives builders and architects the tools to respond to growing requests from homeowners for green and energy-efficient houses, whether new or remodeled. Homeowners can use the book to understand the concepts, process, and options, whether they're doing it themselves or working with a professional.Daily Field Guide: A Logbook for Home Builders, Second Edition
Organization is the key to any superintendent or project managerÂ’s success. With this revised edition of Daily Field Guide, you can manage the details to keep each job running smoothly and on schedule. Use it to keep accurate records of jobsite activities, to document what happened during the course of construction, and to schedule trade contractors and suppliers. This concise logbook will help you gather and organize the essential information you need to have on the jobsite. Now includes a computer disk, so you can easily modify and personalize each form, chart, and checklist.Sunday, October 02, 2011
The Contractor's Legal Kit: The Complete User-Friendly Legal Guide for Home Builders and Remodelers
Contractors will never again be without the legal information they need. This user-friendly guide for home builders and remodelers includes a free CD-ROM with legal forms and contracts available to copy and adapt for their needs.
Friday, September 30, 2011
2009 Home Builders' Jobsite Codes: A Quick Guide to the 2009 International Residential Code
2009 Home Builders Jobsite Codes provides the information from the 2009 International Residential Code in a compact, concise guide that can be taken along to the jobsite. The guide provides easy-to-read code requirements for every aspect of residential construction. This user-friendly field guide is packed with illustrations, tables, figures, and a glossary, to facilitate your understanding of the codes.Thursday, September 29, 2011
Tomorrow's house: a complete guide for the home-builder
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.Coastal Design: A Guide for Builders, Planners, and Home Owners
No one can tell you how to build better and manage smarter than Al Trellis and Paul Sharp. Whether you need a business advisor, therapist, or drill sergeant, Building with an Attitude will get you thinking about your home building in new and innovative ways. Trellis and Sharp combine industry experience with common sense and entrepreneurial spirit to bring you solid advice that will help you run your business more efficiently. Get insights on management, design, hiring, customer relations, pricing, and marketing that will help you improve your business. By applying the tips and techniques shared by Trellis and Sharp, youll find that building homes really can be fun and profitable.
Key Features:
* Discusses how to know your market to increase sales
* Outlines systems to improve business management practices
* Describes how to develop and promote your marketing message
* Provides design hot buttons
* Discusses how to hire and motivate good people
Home Builder's Guide to Continuous Improvement: Schedule, Quality, Customer Satisfaction, Cost, and Safety
Presenting well-known tools and techniques, the Home Builder's Guide to Continuous Improvement provides important insights and necessary information to reduce cycle time duration and variation in order to improve quality and customer satisfaction and to minimize costs and accidents. Each chapter offers examples based on the authors' personal experience working with builders and trade contractors. Including figures and graphs to enhance the text, this book contains simple language, using residential construction industry terminology to improve understanding of continuous improvement concepts and practices. No previous math background is required, making it suitable for all levels.From Good Market Research to Great Marketing: A How-To Guide for Home Builders
Every time a builder visits a competitor's new home neighborhood, that's market research. Every interview with an architect or interior designer and every portfolio review adds to market research. Every meeting with miffed homeowners, every celebratory block party - well, you get the idea.
You are probably conducting informal market research already. Find out how to analyze and use this information to your greatest advantage in From Good Market Research to Great Marketing: A How-to Guide for Home Builders. Collecting market and buyer information requires skills you can readily learn with a little practice.The potential for increasing profits is enormous.
New home marketing expert Colleen Edwards discusses how to determine your audience, develop a product that meets their needs, and promote your homes and services to this target audience. From low cost market research you can conduct yourself to advice on hiring a consultant, Edwards examines a wide variety of market research techniques.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Home Builders' Jobsite Codes: A Pocket Guide to the 2006 International Residential Code
Home Builder's Jobsite Codes provides easy access to the information you need. A quick reference to the 2006 International Residential Code, the guide provides easy-to-read code requirements for every aspect of residential construction. This user-friendly field guide is packed with illustrations, tables, figures, and a glossary, to facilitate your understanding of the codes.Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Your New House: The Alert Consumer's Guide to Buying and Building a Quality Home
This year 1.2 million consumers will buy a new home, and they need real help in navigating the new-home minefield. The latest edition of Your New House includes charts, tables, black-and-white illustrations throughout, as well as updated prices and new trends in home buying. Also added is information on the dot-com shakeout, including what it means for online mortgages and home listings; more Web addresses for all major product manufacturers; and the best websites for deals on products like carpet and lighting. “The best book available on how to buy and build a new home.” — Chicago Tribune Sunday, August 21, 2011
Building Green, New Edition: A Complete How-To Guide to Alternative Building Methods Earth Plaster * Straw Bale * Cordwood * Cob * Living Roofs (Building Green: A Complete How-To Guide to Alternative)
The best-selling and highly regarded reference to sustainable construction gets an update! It’s refreshed with a completely revised introduction, a bright new cover, and extensive online resource tie-ins. Plus, it’s now printed on recycled paper with agri-based inks, so it’s greener than ever!
This groundbreaking book doesn’t just tell you about ?green” house-building techniques: it actually shows you, with more than 1,200 step-by-step photographs that follow the actual erection of an alternative building from site selection to final-touch interior details. Readers will get a clear sense of the real world challenges as Snell and Callahan create a lovely country cottage using four methods: straw bale, cob, cordwood, and modified stick-frame.
Along with sidebars throughout, there’s a thorough discussion of the fundamentals of building construction, alternative approaches, and designing a beautiful yet environmentally responsible home. Building Green was the first book of its kind?and it remains heads and shoulders above other titles in this field.
The Complete Guide to Building Your Own Home and Saving Thousands on Your New House
Buying a new home can be an expensive endeavor. Many people dream of building their own home but mistakenly believe that doing so is not cost effective. However, by building your own home you can save 20 to 40 percent or more. By reading The Complete Guide to Building Your Own Home and Saving Thousands on Your New House you will discover that your dream can become reality. From basic planning to construction methods, this new book will take you through all the steps of building your own home. You will learn how to choose a site, draw up a construction time line, apply for construction loans and financing, obtain essential insurance information, buy inexpensive plans, find and negotiate with subcontractors, comply with building codes, select features and fixtures, choose the style of the house, decide on the size of the rooms, prepare plans, and get permits. You will learn about building materials and foundations, floors, walls, paint, windows, decks, garage doors, roofing, flashings, chimneys, plumbing, wiring, ceilings, floors, railings, and attics. In addition, you will learn how to design a home that will meet your needs, perform constructions tasks safely, and build amenities. We will inform you about common problems to watch for, including foundation, roofing, walls, stairs, sidewalks, driveways, heating and cooling, electrical capacity, and wiring. This book will detail money-saving options and environmentally friendly techniques, while at the same time allowing you to monitor the quality of the materials and the workmanship, fine-tune the design, and make sure the results are exactly what you had envisioned.How to Design and Build a Green Office Building: A Complete Guide to Making Your New or Existing Building Environmentally Healthy
As energy costs rise, more and more companies are looking to create green offices buildings ones that use resources efficiently while simultaneously creating healthier working environments. The energy use statistics are staggering: The heating, cooling, and powering of offices accounts for 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States and are responsible for more than 70 percent of the country s total electricity usage. Office computers consume $1 billion of electricity annually. Moreover, recent surveys demonstrate that employees are fed up with their companies energy-wasting ways: One-third of workers are more inclined to work for a company that is going green, and approximately 50 percent want their employers to be more environmentally friendly. How can you attract workers and reduce your costs at the same time? By going green; the tips in How to Design and Build a Green Office Building will show you how. In this book, you will learn how to protect the building occupants health, how to improve employee productivity, how to use resources more efficiently, how to reduce your impact on the environment, how to select a site for a new building, how to protect and maintain the current landscape, how to use recycled content, how to use natural lighting, how to install high-efficiency lighting systems, how to select heating and cooling systems, how to select materials, and how to use dimensional planning and material efficiency strategies. You will also learn everything you need to know about water savings, energy efficiency, environmentally-friendly building materials, indoor environmental quality, building shape and orientation, alternative energy sources, dual plumbing, green building guidelines, gray water systems, water-conserving fixtures, the costs and financial benefits of building green, foundations, floors, and roofing. In addition, How to Design and Build a Green Office Building provides you with thousands of low or no cost ways to make your office more environmentally friendly. Whether you are building a brand new building, remodeling an existing one, or even just looking to make small changes that will have a big impact, you need to read this book. Employing the techniques in this book will ultimately save you money, increase your productivity, and attract more employees.What Your Contractor Can't Tell You: The Essential Guide to Building and Renovating
What Your Contractor Can't Tell You is a comprehensive guide to getting the best results while building or renovating a home. Most homeowners spend about 20% of their time on the plan and 80% of their time on a messy, traumatic, expensive construction phase. Pros spend 80% of their time on the plan and 20% on a smooth construction phase. But the homeowners can't know what goes into a solid plan unless someone tells them. This book is based on a simple premise...if homeowners knew even 10% of what the professionals in the construction field know, they could avoid 90% of the problems. Creating a dream home shouldn't be a nightmare. Hiring a contractor is an enormous investment and a high-risk endeavor involving decisions that will last forever. This book equips homeowners with the information and strategies needed to turn their vision into a home or a renovation that can be built on time and within budget. Chapters give detailed coverage of critical topics: design; selecting and supervising the architect and contractor; cost estimates; budget; plan specifications; contracts; dealing with town officials; and keeping track of everything along the way. For each stage of the project, there is detailed information on common pitfalls and how to avoid them, as well as insiders' tips which reveal what most contractors can't tell you. This book was previously published by Warner Books (2004) and titled What the "Experts" May Not Tell You About Building or Renovating Your Home.Saturday, August 20, 2011
Bob Vila's Guide to Historic Homes of New England (Bob Vila's Guides to Historic Homes of America)
The 2008 global recession and the nearly universal awareness of significant climate change have begun to alter architectural thinking. Even though architects will continue to dream up seemingly function-free building forms for the most conspicuous consumers, mainstream architects are being asked to provide energy efficient, cost-driven forms that also delight the eye. The movement to preserve and reuse existing structures has gained momentum, and the incidence of new and old architectural juxtapositions has increased. Forward-thinking planners are advocating m ore concentrated urban density, in part to decrease inefficient use of energy for transportation. As this thinking becomes public policy, architects will be challenged to adapt historically significant buildings for new uses, often by creating additions to existing forms. Although not entirely new, architectural dilemmas concerning how new meets old will occur revealing issues that most architects w ho design new buildings have not often thought about. Historic preservationists and sustainability advocates seem to concentrate solely on single issues leading to aesthetically clumsy architecture while agency review panels and the public approval process continue to erode the integrity of building designs making the creation of truly excellent designs difficult. Reclaimed Buildings: New Meets Old explores these topics in depth, with a focus on architectural design. The book addresses the question of aesthetic sustainability given the new influences and design tools that have emerged during the first decade of the 21st century. It is written for practitioners as well as students of architecture, and includes examples and case studies of built works that have successfully wrestled with the question of how new meets old in architecture.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Your Green Home: A Guide to Planning a Healthy, Environmentally Friendly New Home (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series)
More and more homeowners today want houses that are healthy to live in and cause minimal damage to the environment. That’s what green building is all about.
Your Green Home is written for homeowners planning a new home—whether you are working with an architect or builder, or serving as your own general contractor. Intended to improve the overall environmental performance of new houses being built, the book sets out to answer some of the big-picture questions relating to having a home designed and built—and getting what you want.
Your Green Home covers:
• Home location and its relationship to the community
• Site design
• Construction systems
• Building design to optimize energy performance
• Renewable energy systems
• Material selection
• Indoor environmental quality
• Water efficiency
• Material selection
Written by the founder of BuildingGreen—North America’s premier green building authority—this book will prove useful not only to future homeowners, but also to designers and builders seeking to meet this demand. Building professionals well-versed in green building may find this a useful book to give to potential clients to convey the scope and principles of green building.
Alex Wilson is president of BuildingGreen, Inc. and executive editor of Environmental Building News, the oldest and most respected publication serving North America’s green building industry. A green building expert since the 1970s, he has authored countless articles on the topic and several books, including Green Building Products, the Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings, and Green Development: Integrating Ecology and Real Estate.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
The New Ecological Home: A Complete Guide to Green Building Options (Chelsea Green Guides for Homeowners)
Today, a new generation of architects and builders is emerging, intent on creating homes that meet human needs for shelter while causing only a fraction of the environmental impact of conventional housing. "The New Ecological Home" provides an overview of green building techniques, materials, products, and technologies that are either currently available or will be in the near future. Author Daniel Chiras provides a wealth of up-to-date, practical information for home buyers, owner-builders, and anyone interested in building for a sustainable future. Included are chapters on: - The Healthy House - Green Building Materials - Wood-Wise Construction - Energy Efficiency - Earth-Sheltered Architecture - Passive Solar Heating and Passive Cooling - Green Power: Electricity from the Sun and Wind - Water and Waste: Sustainable Approaches - Environmental Landscaping
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