Monthly Archives: April 2013

LEEDing Us to Water – minding conservation

Water Conservation

In the developed world where most of us reading this post live, we tend to take clean water for granted. And we are often wasteful. We even pay crazy prices for it packaged in plastic bottles. Natural mineral water has been elevated to a gourmet status with bottling and labeling rivaling what we find on fine wine racks.

We don’t think much about water consumption in general when in fact globally water is scarce. This is a cruel fact when you consider that nearly 1 billion people in developing countries across the globe do not have access to it. For them, clean, safe drinking water is seriously scarce. Continue reading

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Filed under Design, LEED ®, Materials

Tracking LEED Credits – guest post / take one

 Derek and staff

I was recently contacted by a lady named Aundraya Ruse regarding the FSB Blog. She is with a company that provides software advice to clients and shared a recent article her company published about software tools that can help construction contractors track activities to properly achieve each LEED point for their project. I took a look and it was an interesting article. Our continued correspondence led to discussions about having them as a guest author on the FSB Blog.

She introduced me to Derek Singleton/ERP Analyst at Software Advice and we eventually had a telephone interview. He only had one photo of himself, so in order to make it into a collage I took the liberties of taking an Andy Warhol approach to manipulating the singular photo in my possession (sorry Aundraya). So here’s my interview with Derek. Continue reading

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Filed under Construction, Guests, LEED ®

LEEDing the Way – documentation

Cairn

It’s time to take a look at where we are on the path to LEED Certification. Early in the project going back to setting the goals with the client we collectively discussed the sustainability objectives for the project and it was decided to achieve one of the higher levels attainable. Then as a team we reviewed all the available LEED points and set a target for those points we would and could obtain. We identified the points necessary to achieve LEED Gold Certification. We initially set our sights higher than that but resolved after reviewing certain project constraints that we could handily go for gold.

The worksheet and narrative that we used to document our direction was published in our post “LEED-how green is green.” But you can go straight to the LEED Project Checklist by clicking “here.” So what happens next after you set your LEED point goals? Well at that point we incorporate the requirements whether it was energy efficiency, low-emitting materials or other credits into the design and construction documents; drawings and specifications which were explored in “Blueprints / what are they, what are they for.” Continue reading

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Filed under Construction, LEED ®, Materials

Purpose and Place – what is it about

Chickasaw Warrior

Chukma (welcome)

We have been discussing the Visitor Center project now for over a year and reviewing the progress of the construction for the past 6 months. But it’s easy to lose sight over what the project is about and who it’s for. I thought we would refresh ourselves on both of these subjects.

Who is the project for… Continue reading

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Filed under Background, Design

Taking It to the Next Level

cover beam

While the Visitor Center overall is a split level, each of the two levels is basically a one story structure. The level above the floor slab in our case is the roof plane. So taking it to the next level and for us the highest level of the project means topping out the building with the roof structure. Continue reading

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Filed under Construction, Design, Materials