In general, I dislike the idea of just putting a list of links on a page. For one thing, they need to be maintained. And information is hardly static either.
There are lots of vendors and manufacturers selling this, that, and the other thing. Some vendors have significant budgets to devote to Internet presence and advertising, and they can attract a lot of attention. Some products do little except transfer money from consumers to the vendors, distributors and/or manufacturers. Some products are gimics looking for a reason to exist. Some products are cheap, in one or more senses of the word. Some products are cost effective, and some are high in quality. Some products are distributed over large regions, and some are localised.
I happen to visit "big box" stores more often than not, when I am buying product or looking for ideas. Many stores in the industry purport to have employees that are knowledgable in the products they sell, but these same employees can be stifled by potential liability concerns, and hence their knowledge is less useful than one might expect.
I am probably going to mention specific products, stores or manufacturers in places. The intention is in general not to specify that the something or somewhere is especially good or bad.
One thing I would look out for, as a reasonably good indicator to not buy a product is excessive use of intellectual property terms like patent, copyright, trademark, industrial design, .... Quite often the use is meant to indicate some kind of fitness for service or approval. Intellectual property rights are warnings to other manufacturers to not copy an idea, for the most part they are useless to consumers.
The order things are mentioned in the Table of Contents has nothing to do with quality or importance.
This list is not meant to be exhaustive, just useful.
There are quite a few sites out there which publish the results of scientific studies about housing construction, or research and development in housing construction. They aren't necessarily government sites, although they do tend to be that way.
PATHnet is a partnership between the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the housing industry. It can be found at: http://www.PATHnet.org/ A related website sometimes seen is http://www.ToolBase.org/
I am not sure how the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation got involved in researching and publishing things of interest to both the new and used housing market, but I am glad they did. I have not run across a similar organisation anywhere in the world which publishes what CMHC does. You will see sites all over the world reference CMHC articles. You can find them at: http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/
To me, an engineer from the "south" who moved to Boston. His company looks to be at the forefront of lots of things, and has a good assortment of free and not-free information. You can find them at: http://www.buildingscience.com/
One of the programs mentioned on the Building Science Corporation website is called "Building America". This program is run by the U.S. DOE. It seems to cover a lot more than the Canadian program from the National Research Council called R-2000. The Building America program even figured prominantly in one episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. California Governor, Arnold Schwarzeneggar even got involved in that one.
Most sites related to solar power, originate at places relatively close to the equator. Not terribly relevent to Canada. The EERE built a solar house in/near Boulder, Colorado, the home of EERE (I believe). Sure, it's not as far north as most of Canada, but at more than 1600 meters, it's climate comes reasonably close to a lot of Canada where the population is "large". But, this is where all the stuff related to energy efficiency in housing from the U.S. Department of Energy comes from, so even without the tie-in to Canadian relevence, it is a site worth visiting. It can be found at: http://www.eere.energy.gov/.
There isn't any good reason why these sites can't have as good of information as the more government oriented sites listed above. Being non-government, they need to find money for existance in some way. Quite often, this means advertising. But, it amy also happen that the person running the site is a contractor of (apparently) some skill. If so, they might be someone to look into if they happen to live in your neighbourhood.
WOODBWEB is a web site designed to run off various kinds of sponsorship. There are a number of forums which are part of the site, with each forum having an expert in charge of the forum. Perhaps most of the people contributing to any given forum is an expert as well. Questions posed to the forums tend to be made by people who already have a fair amount of knowledge in the topic in question. This isn't a place where newbies should be asking questions in general, but it is a place where newbies can learn a great deal by searching through the archives (called Knowledge Base) and reading previous articles.
The topics include: cabinet making, sawmills, finishing, and wood choice.
Jon Eakes is from Montreal (I believe), and is a good, all around handyman. I still see him on little blurbs on The Weather Network, and I think he still has one or two TV shows going. He has a searchable database of problems with solutions, or you can ask him. Most of his knowledge is particular to Canada, but being such a HUGE country, it's probably useful in most other places too.
John Bridge is a name I ran across numerous times when looking for information about tiling. I would estimate that he is as good with tile as Jon Eakes is with wood. I think he is residing in the Houston, Texas area now, but has been around a bit. As anyone long associated with housing (like Jon Eakes above), he tends to be knowledgable about lots of related topics outside his specialty.
Having a house which will likely survive a hurricane, should you live in hurricane country, is nice. Such a house will probably also stand up to other wind driven events like tornados. The University of Florida has (at least) one site which might be of interest: Escambia County Windstorm Mitigation Training & Demonstration Center
Both ecological and green are buzzwords in society these days. Just because something claims to be ecological, green, organic, or any similar term, doesn't necessarily mean it will fit your definition. If nothing else, there is a lot of marketing at play. A brief look at either of the following sites might be of interest. Building for Health - Materials Center or Green Home Building: Manufactured Systems
Over the years, interest has grown in various kinds of alternatives to stick built or masonary houses. The straw bale wall is one such wall system. Here are a couple of links, the latter being a collection of links. Straw Bale Construction and Surfin' StrawBale
Another technology is rammed earth. Some rammed earth walls also make use of insulation. A straw bale house tends to be well insulated, whereas the rammed earth house has lots of thermal mass. Sorry, no links. But the term is searchable in search engines.
Vapour barriers and air infiltration barriers are two kinds of things that one finds used in housing, especially in places where water can freeze or condense inside the wall cavity. Water has an unusually large specific heat coefficient, a small amount of water movement can result in a large movement of heat. The presence of liquid water is often implicated in many cases of house degradation, such as mold and rot. Here is a link to some information on Vapor Barriers and House Wraps
Good conrete is not just a casual mix of cement, sand, rocks and water. Having clean ingredients is important, as are things like: particle size, ingredient quality, and mixing time/method. There are numerous additives which can go into concrete. Fly ash is one additive which may be used more in the future; concrete incorporating fly ash as a (partial) replacement for cement takes longer to cure, but often cures to a high strength. Another additive seen in many concrete is the addition of some kind of fiber, Propex Concrete Systems is one such company with a system. Typically these things are added by the concrete supplier, but you might be "rolling" your own.
Making walls, doors, windows more or less sound proof isn't typically part of the job of building a house, and many house construction techniques actually help sound get through. Here is a link which might give you a start on How To Sound proof walls.
There are lots of companies making adhesives and finishes for the wood and housing industries. There are products for just about every purpose and price range. Steve Smith is kind of unusual in this field. Most of his products are epoxies, where the resins for the epoxy originate from wood, not petrochemicals. One of his products has found use in finishing wood, wood restoration and sealing concrete. He also sells a clear polyurethane which should last 5 years (his claim). Five Year Clear is at a separate web site, and there are many distributors selling the various epoxy products around the world, under a variety of names. This is the Smith & Co. home page.
There is some evidence to suggest that these wood based epoxy resins are less stiff (more compliant) than epoxy resins derived from petrochemicals (or coal).
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