reuse | Selfbuild Central

Patrick and Fiona’s house

Existing houses present a much greater challenge than new ones in terms of energy saving. However in terms of reusing building materials they often provide better opportunities.

Patrick and Fiona run a very pleasant bed and breakfast near Nelson, Caerphilly and their house has been the subject of much renovation and extension over the [...]

‘Under the Sun’, a Victorian terrace house in Birmingham is an outstanding example of bringing a fairly typical old building up to PassivhausSee more on the Passivhaus standard. The PassivHaus Institute has pioneered a standard for low energy buildings. It includes very low energy usage and ways of achieving this. The word is derived [...]

Timber

January ’13

Advantages of timber

Constructing with FSCForest Stewardship Council (who accredit timber) timber (or another accreditation organisation such as PEFCProgramme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification. See their web site) is potentially one of the greenest ways of building for several reasons.

Timber itself captures and locks up CO² as it grows and keeps [...]

Designing with timber

timber house in the Field of Dreams, Findhorn FoundationThe Findhorn Foundation is a large community near Inverness. There is a strong emphasis on sustainable building and living.

See some of the wealth of interesting UK timber designs here.

advantages and drawbacks

Timber can provide some of the greenest solutions to house building for several [...]

Building Materials

Smile Plastics recycle plastics into beautiful high quality sheet materials. Here’s an example of bottle recycling

Sustainability of building materials

This can have several slightly different meanings which are to do with:

Whether the material is actually running out or very rare (e.g. Cuban Mahogany) Whether the embodied energythe total amount of energy it [...]

Green Design

October 2011

Background

If you are thinking of building a green building then it pays to be aware of where this whole process is going

Eco-house design is a fairly recent development which started getting off the ground in the UK during the mid 1990s.

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Although you will probably end up using [...]

Window design

There are many purposes a window can serve and several of these have important ecological considerations:

Letting light in Collecting solar heat Providing a view Acting as a door The visual character of a house

Windows may have associated drawbacks to consider:

They may let in too much light at certain times Too [...]