In my last blog I shared with you a few of the challenges of my mobile home youth. But that is only part of the story. What started as a single-wide mobile home in 1973, morphed into a multi-level, fully-insulated, ranch-style home complete with cement foundation and wrap-around porch. The lessons learned during the remodeling projects taught me a great deal about the importance of incorporating building science into even the smallest jobs.

Over the 18 years we lived in the mobile home, my dad designed and built no less than eight additions to our home. The first few were modest, moving the tip-out from the side of the structure to the end to create a larger master bed room. The next was knocking out a wall here and there to create more open space. But after a few years he became more adventurous and before long the projects had doubled the original square footage of the home.

During each project my dad had one goal - increase the comfort of the home without increasing the energy bill. This meant we had to be innovative and conservative on a very limited budget. His designs favored centralized living spaces to reduce demand on the heating system (bedroom doors faced the wood stove), extensive use of recycling materials (I spent hours pulling nails and scraping dried cement off former forms that would become studs), and low-impact construction (don't trample the flower beds!)

Today it would be considered "green", back then we called it common sense.

Unfortunately, common sense and building science don't always see eye to eye.

A few months after putting a new roof on the house we discovered pink streams of water soaking and staining the new ceiling and pooling on the new carpet below. The culprit was condensation because of a poor venting strategy in the rafters.

Common sense suggested that trapping the warm air in the attic space was akin to wearing a wool hat. Building science suggests that warm moist air coming in contact with a cold roof will stain your carpets insulation pink.

These sorts of frustrations hounded us during our many remodeling projects.

Today with the access to the Web, I would like to think that the errors we made could be avoided, but I'm not so sure. When folks can't afford to hire a contractor to do most of the work on a remodeling project, or decide not too, the quality of the job will ultimately depend on their knowledge of better building practices.

That's a tall order.

Getting the information into the hands of the home improvement crowd before they start swinging hammers is critical. Folks like Ed Del Grande are certainly a good start, but is it enough?

Though we often focus on new construction here at the Green Team, I think helping the do-it-yourself home enthusiast make their projects more durable, sustainable, and energy efficient is a must if we are serious about getting better building practices mainstream.

What do you think?