Voltaire wrote Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien, often translated as "The perfect is the enemy of the good;" he might well have been talking about residential construction. You run the gamut from the ...

Learn how to build adobe walls with adobe bricks for an economical building material to use in almost any climate. The following article is an excerpt from chapter 5 of The Owner-Built Adobe House by ...

Shear walls are walls specifically designed to resist lateral loads, transferring the load from the wall above to the wall below and, ultimately, out through the foundation. This is a critical role in ...

While no building is truly fireproof, construction materials and systems can make a building fire safe. Fire-resistive construction gives time to discover a fire, suppress it before it spreads and ...