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This all started pretty innocuously. I just wanted a client to have a warm floor. How complicated could that be? Well some seemingly innocuous code language made things irritating but not difficult… Read More

A hockey1 puck is 1 inch thick and 3 inches in diameter (Photograph 1). You can easily slip one into the airspace between a brick veneer and building paper. Now a single puck in an airspace like that… Read More

As my friend Mac Pierce likes to point out: you could get a blindfolded drunk epileptic to cross Niagara Falls on a high wire without a net, but it wouldn’t be a good idea. There are some wall… Read More

Imagine a three-dimensional molecular billiard game with billiard balls that are sometimes sticky, and where the rules depend on where you are on the table. Then assume that there are many different… Read More

You can’t replace experience and judgment with lab tests and a computer simulation. But when you add lab tests to the experience and judgment and have an adult supervise the process, you might be… Read More

Double Rubble Toil and Trouble1“When you insulate your basement on the inside, the rubble foundation will freeze apart, and you will get swelling from the freezing soil collapsing the wall, and… Read More

Hospitals are not fun places to work in, and they are not fun places to build and design or to fix and repair. The stakes are often high. Nothing is more sobering than when someone dies because of a… Read More

Spain gave Florida to the United States in exchange for the United States giving up any claims on Texas. We all know how that turned out. Nobody really wanted to live there except the Seminoles until… Read More

 Our story starts with a self-important politician taking a shower in a new home in Las Vegas in the mid 1990’s and ends with ten’s of thousands of houses with leaks and litigation. Our story will… Read More

After one hundred and fifty years the Illinois cottage1 is undergoing some pretty interesting changes and the ghosts of George Washington Snow and Augustine Taylor2 are cautiously eyeing the result.… Read More