Jeff Wilson Everyday DIY Blog

As LEED celebrates its 10th anniversary, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) reports that one billion square feet of buildings around the world have now been LEED certified. Although that is just a drop in the global bucket, certification has helped to spur green construction; according to the Green Outlook 2011: Green Trends Driving Growth report by McGraw--Hill Construction (MHC), LEED specification is mentioned in 71% of all U.S. projects valued at over $50 million.

This year, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Spain celebrates its 20th anniversary. Well, sort of. While the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia officially opened its doors in 1990, the building has been transformed by so many architects over the years that it’s difficult to date.

The project was a seismic retrofit of a 15-story, 750,000 sq. ft. office building constructed in 1991. The steel portion of the project consisted of systematically strengthening the moment connections throughout the building and installing over 200 dampers without interrupting the operation of the tenants. The contract dictated that the work would start in the basement, progress through the ground floor and the parking garage (floors 2-5), and then continue through the occupied office floors (6-15). The contractor could only occupy three half-floors at any one time. Although my team was extremely experienced, with over 20 years of seismic experience and over 50 years of steel work experience, this project provided us with some significant lessons to take with us to our next project.

Located in Freeport, Pennsylvania, about a 30 minute drive north of Pittsburgh, Buffalo Township’s water treatment plant produces over 700,000 gallons of fresh water daily. The plant provides drinking water to over 5,000 residents in Buffalo Township and Freeport Borough. It is also the fresh water supplier for the Municipal Authority of South Buffalo Township. Join Buildipedia for a photo tour of Buffalo Township’s water treatment plant, as we trace the flow of water from the Allegheny River to its distribution throughout the utility.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) 2009 American Housing Survey (AHS) determined that 66% of U.S. households have a dishwasher. It's not really any surprise that two-thirds of our homes have a dishwasher when you consider that today's Energy Star dishwashers will save you time, water, and utility costs. Depending on how often you use your dishwasher, you can expect an average life expectancy of nine years, according to the Study of Life Expectancy of Home Components, prepared in 2007 by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). Performing simple maintenance tasks will help your dishwasher last longer than expected and will also reduce the likelihood that your dishwasher will cause water damage to your home.

During times of economic uncertainty, we need to expect more out of every investment. Whether as a homeowner making small improvements or as a business owner making multimillion dollar improvements, we must make highly informed decisions to capitalize on the investment. Buildipedia's new series on ROI (return on investment) driven products looks to provide the information to help make these decisions. This step-by-step approach to a product's cost as well as its ROI will aid both new builds and retrofits. Here we focus on windows and toilets, both of which play big roles in energy and water usage in our buildings and provide different opportunities to reduce expenses.

Perhaps no building type has changed more in the past generation than the university library. Enormous book collections, once the organizing feature of these buildings, have lost their prominence as scholastic resources. Today’s college students, having grown up using the Internet, have little patience for a warren of "stacks" and laborious searches through printed materials. Therefore, a building prototype that was traditional, monumental, and static has given way to a new, more fluid style.The dynamic form created by Zaha Hadid to house the new Library and Learning Center for the University of Economics and Business in Vienna, Austria, makes a definitive statement regarding the contemporary function of a scholarly library.

In this gift buying guide, we look at innovative DIY tools that any DIYer or weekend warrior would love to have. The tools included range from a flooring saw that will allow you to make cuts in the same location you are installing your floor to a multifunctional sawhorse that has over one ton of clamping force. Each tool listed is a winner as a potential gift.

8Tallet, by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), has one of the world's largest green roofs and was designed to function as a complete community rather than an apartment building. Learn more about this cool building in one of the world's most environmentally progressive cities, Copenhagen.

Construction is underway on the campus of Bowling Green State University (BGSU). If all goes according to plan, the Wolfe Center for the Collaborative Arts will be finished in 2011. The timing seems perfect, given that the university recently dubbed the arts its first “Center of Excellence.” This gorgeous building by up-and-coming Norwegian-based architectural firm Snohetta will most certainly bring attention to and validate the importance of the arts programs.

Ask your safety manager or operations risk manager and they will tell you about the numerous additional hazards a crew will face at night. Consult work studies and you will see that working at night lowers the efficiency of any of your work crews. Unfortunately, few studies or safety managers will tell you about the managerial and contractual challenges contractors face when they take on night work.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. This is the simplest mantra of the environmental movement and the guiding principle for families and small programs across the nation. How does this principle apply to infrastructure, specifically asphalt pavement? We already use as little asphalt pavement as we can, but this is more an economic decision. We recycle asphalt pavement to build new pavement. We reuse it as clean fill. What else can we do with it? Can we use it to collect solar energy?