Insulation Tips for Hot, Humid Climates The best way to insulate your house (or church, school, or office building) greatly depends on what type of environment you live in. If you look at historic houses and buildings, you can learn a lot about how to design for your climate, because early builders had to adapt to the local conditions to try to make buildings as comfortable as possible. Purple ... Read More
Heimsath Architect’s team members are now in week 4 of self-isolation. Like many of you, our communications with the outside are mostly through the various conferences call applications (Go to Meeting, Zoom, Skype). It has been working well, though I find that looking all the faces in boxes invariably gets the Brady Bunch theme song stuck in my head. For the past 20 years, we have done our ... Read More
Accessibility issues can be particularly complicated and challenging for churches. When it comes to church kitchens and accessibility, there are a surprising number of gray areas in applying building codes and permitting requirements. Here are five issues that need to be considered early in the planning of your kitchen: Volunteers are not Employees and not all that goes on in a Church Kitchen is ... Read More
In the past, stained glass back-lighting has been quite difficult. The fluorescent and incandescent light sources we had to work with created heat, were hard to access, and had color issues. The stained glass never looked good compared to the natural lighting provided by sunlight. However there are some new LED solutions that are making it much easier to have a beautiful installation without ... Read More
If you are thinking about remodeling or building a home, you ought to give Houzz.com a try. It is a repository of 800,000+ pictures that various people have uploaded to the site. With this you can browse and find spaces you like and create idea books that you can share. One of our recent clients used this a lot both to help her understand what she wanted and to communicate this infromation to us. ... Read More
Last week I dicussed options for reducing the amount of water that you use inside your house through adapting your habits and installing fixtures or appliances that are more efficient. This week we need to talk about what goes on outside, because a lot of the water that you use never actually enters your house but instead gets used for irrigating landscaping. This water has been processed to make ... Read More
GREEN BUILDING As the newest member of the Heimsath staff, I have been offered the opportunity to share some of my interests through this blog. Since I am particularly interested in green building, I wanted to kick off with a series on sustainable water solutions. A little background may be helpful to explain my interest in sustainability. I grew up on a farm in Vermont where waste was closely ... Read More
More and more we see our church clients wanting lighting control to highlight areas of the worship space. It could be that they want to have a different set of lights to highlight the baptism, it could be that at times they want to light up of the choir area, or maybe they want to have a dim the lights and just have light shining on the pulpit. Traditionally this is done in one of two ways; ... Read More
As one of many native Chinese who were born in mid 80s and raised in central China, I had little exposure to religion or places of religious worship. If you had asked me “what is a church” several years ago, my answer probably would be a gothic cathedral with large stained glass windows, long somber corridors and loud ringing bells or a similar architype from history. Most of my early knowledge ... Read More
Solar Panels on the Front roof Area There is a 5.76 KW solar array on the Purple Heron House. Given that the house is a 5-star rated (or will be when Autsin Green Building finishes its process), we looked into Solar as a way to make the house even more effiecient (with the current efficiencies of the solar panels, it is usually better to conserve first and then look to generation). At the time ... Read More
