Site Status

Aug 2018: rework of the construction section, including much new and improved coverage about moisture control and a number of other improvements: foundations in particular.

May 2015: added more info on slab heat loss & turned heat loss example into a modifiable "spreadsheet".  Upgraded the passive solar pages significantly.  Added a page on building with shipping containers.

May 2014: new, cleaner look.  Site reorganized to from the perspective of "what you want to do".  New architecture section and new construction section. Green building developments from the last 3 years added.  Prep for HTML5; now uses some CSS3 features.

Feb 2010: In addition to a site redesign, many minor corrections have been made (in particular an attempt has been made to cover more climate zones), and the site is organized a little different from previously.  Many illustrations have been added to the energy section, but other sections still need work.  The Seattle house notes still need to re-written in summary form--the original notes are interesting, but too much to wade thru if you just want to find out what we did.

The site is now XHTML1.0 and CSS2.1, although it hasn't been verified yet.  That means that if you're using an older browser (ie IE6.0 or older), the pages are likely to be very ugly.  The site is optimized to run under firefox.

Thankfully, many people have documented all the quirks of HTML/CSS, and so I'd like to thank all the various websites that gave me ideas on layout without tables, how to get around all the quirks to Internet explorer, why "vertical-align" works only sometimes, why "text-align:center" works on text and images, but fails miserably when you try to attach a caption to the image, and so on.