TAKE A DRIVE, it might even save the planet

Now I’d rather you do this on your skate board, bike, hybrid or the like, but I drive a F-350 (not much, really, honest — I use my wife’s car when ever I can get away with it), but however you do it, if you’re thinking of building or remodelling please do yourself a favour and go for a good drive in the country side. We’re going hunting for old buildings. Anything abandoned. And the older the better.

Planning…never enough planning.

The effects of manufactured housing on our planet are undeniable. Every two by four and sheet of plywood has travelled thousands of miles from the forest to get to your local big box. The energy it takes to make and move these little sticks and sheets is awesome. And not the good, gnarly dude, kind of awesome — it’s the staggering, who-the-hell-thought-that-up type of awesome. All that is going to have to give way before the wave of Green Thinking.

I’ve been building high end custom homes for my entire adult life. Repairing the stick built ones when I was working through college. Spent a large portion of my childhood around renovation and addition projects at home, at the grandparents’ and the family cottage. I know how to build using everything from the trees in a wood lot to the manufactured junk they sell at big boxes — we all live in these plywood boxes, so take no offence. The thing that amazes me every time I start a new project is the massive amount of time it takes to plan a building.

The First

There’s always got to be a first.