Another I Spy item from the paper — a lecture series on “green”, sustainable building/retrofits every Saturday at 2pm from Oct 17 through Nov 14th, over at Radha.
Topics include:
Green Roofs
Sustainable Building
Light and Heat
All the details can be found here.

When we first moved in the front yard was in quite a state.  It was a vegetable/weed garden with rotting wood beds, clusters of tulips were randomly scattered here and there, and about 2 inches of soggy newspapers dating back to 2001 covering the entire yard.  Not to mention the decomposing vinyl sheeting on the path [...]

This might be the single biggest problem in tackling a home renovation or restoration.  How do you find good people, that you can afford.   Hell just finding contractors who will call you back is difficult enough right now in Vancouver.
Doing the research you find lots of happy stories, and lots of horror stories about contractors.  And [...]

Yesterday I removed the double-hung windows from the demo house.  It proved to be a lot more work than I had expected.  This is because I didn’t know what I was doing–but not for lack of trying.  I spent a lot of time searching for information on how to remove a double-hung window and frame [...]

Having never done anything even remotely like this before, acting as the designer and general contractor has been an enormous amount of work.
I’d the say the hardest, and most time consuming thing has been the design.  There are so many options available.  So many it’s almost paralyzing.  Over the past year I’ve been chipping away [...]

Right now our kitchen has a couple awkward window that face onto the back yard.  We want to open this up with a single large window centered on that wall.  This of course means getting the window soon because we’ll be opening up the wall when we demo the room, and we can’t leave an [...]