Green Restorations

Book excerpt: Some 40 percent of North Americans live in homes built prior to 1940, and when it comes time to remodel or restore our older homes, homeowners and contractors can find themselves lost in a morass of wildly divergent information and opinion. With Green Restorations , author Aaron Lubeck brings his expertise as a restoration contractor and preservation consultant to this first-of-its-kind guide, leading the reader through the steps for restoring historic building using sustainable practices and green building techniques. In a readily accessible room-by-room and system-by-system format, Green Restorations covers rehabilitation and remodelling questions applicable to old homes, focusing on the core techniques and debates often seen in practice. Here you'll find the answers to restoration questions, such as: Is sealing my old crawl space a good idea? Should I replace or rehabilitate my windows? Are there historic aspects of my home I need to preserve and what can I change? What are the cultural, environmental and financial implications of my proposed changes? Do residential historic tax credits apply to my home and how can I access them? Written in such a way as to be accessible for homeowners but technical enough for contractors, this book will appeal to anyone trying to green an older home while preserving its historic and cultural significance.