Retirement isn’t exactly around the corner!

Building a home for retirement isn’t just about the bells and whistles. Clients want an energy-efficient, accessible home that’s easy to maintain.

In this article: Retiring in style: 3 custom homes that redefine retirement living by Susan Bady, Contributing Editor HousingZone.com, we find that people who build one-of-a-kind custom homes for retirement are more practical than you might think.

They want to hand down a durable, efficient home to their children and grandchildren. They’re also planning for the day when their mobility will decrease and “boomerang” kids might move back in, or they’ll have to care for an aging parent or relative in their home.

Honey Do’s Out of Control?

Does your home repair to-do list seem to be taking over your life? Jeff Wilson, host of Buildipedia’s At Home channel, sympathizes and offers sage advice for how to tame that ever-present “Honey-Do” list.

Every aspiring handyman (or handywoman) has a List. Not the list you make when you head out to the home improvement store for materials, or even the short list of things you need to accomplish this weekend. I’m talking about THE List.

Creating a safe, livable environment to foster aging in place

The U.S. population is aging and many seniors want to continue living independently in their own homes. Creating a safe, livable environment to foster aging in place through universal design without the home screaming “this was made for old people” can be an easy task for professional remodelers.

Good design is good design

The same design features that make a home comfortable for older people also work for younger families.

“Aging in place continues to grow in popularity among homeowners because applying universal design principles in the home transforms it into a multi-generational living space,” notes Mary Jo Peterson, CAPS, on behalf of Delta Faucet. “Homeowners want safe functionality, but don’t want to give up attractive design.

Mortgage Interest Deduction at Risk

Ever since the federal income tax was introduced in 1913, the government has used the tax code to encourage homeownership. Now, as a result of  the effort to reduce the federal deficit, the mortgage interest deduction is under fire. Proposed changes to the tax code would have a dramatic impact on home owners and would significantly reduce the value of this deduction.

The Tom Cruise Wall

As my friend Mac Pierce likes to point out: you could get a blindfolded drunk epileptic to cross Niagara Falls on a high wire without a net, but it wouldn’t be a good idea. There are some wall assemblies that are like that. One in particular irritates me. It has lead to a great deal of grief. It has problems that can easily be avoided. But simple analysis shows it works, and that is the rub. The simple analysis shows that it works, but the real world shows that it does not.

How to paint a wall – I know – Sounds easy right?

Getting ready to paint a wall? Don’t skip the prep work: A properly primed surface makes all the difference.

Clean the walls

Using a large cellulose sponge and a solution of water mixed with a few drops of mild dishwashing liquid, clean your walls to remove any dust, dirt, and grease.

Tape the trim

Use blue painter’s tape (not masking tape) to protect any areas you don’t want your paint to get on, such as trim, molding, doorknobs, window frames, and door frames: Run long strips of the tape just inside the outer edges of these areas. (The outer edges of the tape should lie exactly where the wall meets the trim, covering the parts of the trim that your roller or paintbrush might hit when you paint.)

Good mortgage laws in Texas helped Texas’ housing values hold up in the face of this country’s worst recession since the Great Depression

Loren Steffy’s story in the Houston Chronicle  does a good job of describing how good mortgage laws in Texas helped Texas’ housing values hold up in the face of this country’s worst recession since the Great Depression. While many people in states like California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona were refinancing their homes to take out their equity (at the top of the housing market) after a 5 year run up of unsustainable appreciation (the housing bubble), Texans were capped @ 80 percent. The graphic below gives an example of home price appreciation for a hypothetical $200,000 house purchased in each state in the first quarter of 2001, according to the figures from the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

We should all appreciate the good mortgage laws in Texas and the “steady as you go” housing appreciation we enjoy as illustrated in the graph below. Outside of Texas, only California home values are showing signs of stabilizing.Besides better mortgage laws, Texas has fewer regulations on new housing development which helped us avoid a shortage of homes that forced up home prices in those other states. The state’s ability to increase housing supply to meet demand is more important to maintaining a balanced supply of homes than the mortgage restrictions.

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This green roof stuff is getting out of hand.

In an article on BuildingScience.com – Building Science Insights – Seeing Red Over Green Roofs – Joseph Lstiburek talks about how Building Green is a huge misnomer…and that it is a sensitive subject with many builders.

“It is dumb to do a green roof to save energy. If dirt were energy efficient, we would call it insulation and put it in walls. It is just dirt. Insulation is better insulation than dirt. That is why we call it insulation. And, covering a roof with grass to deal with solar gain is also pretty dumb when you have something much more effective and less expensive available called a reflective membrane.”

Controlling room temperatures with body heat…

Credit: Courtesy Joon-Ho Choi

While he was a university student, Joon-Ho Choi worked in a hospital, where he noticed that patients—especially those in intensive care—rarely have much control over their environments. “They are subjected to temperature and lighting conditions that are set more for the comfort of the nursing staff,” he recalls.

That observation became the inspiration for Choi’s research while studying for his Ph.D. in engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He wanted to see if he could devise a way that human biosignals—such as heart rate, skin temperature, movement, sweat—could be used with body sensors to trigger adjustments in the heating and cooling systems in a room for greater individual comfort.