Japanese firm Daiwa House has designed an emergency mobile home called the EDV-01 and is designed to generate it’s own electricity and water for two adults for an entire month. Perfect for relief agencies in the cases of natural disasters and crisis situations, this emergency home design would have been perfect for the FEMA folks to deploy in New Orleans following the Katrina hurricane.

The stainless steel container is 18 feet long, 6 feet wide and 6 feet tall. On demand from the home’s owner, flip a switch and a hydraulic pump raises the walls to form a second floor with fold-away beds and an office space. The ground floor holds a shower and bio-toilet, as well as a kitchen that cooks food with induction heating.
Equipped with a rooftop solar system and a fuel cell to generate power that’s stored in lithium-ion batteries, the emergency house can also pluck enough moisture from the air to collect about 5 gallons of drinkable water per day.

If this emergency home functions as advertised it will be a big draw for governments and communities around the country as an option for deploying in disaster situations.

Our nations leaders announced a tentative deal to cut the nations debt by a significant amount. Well, we want to do our part to contribute to our fellow Americans savings.

For 2 days only through our close of business on Tuesday August 2nd, we are offering our customers 10% off of any purchase of our Cork Mosaic tiles consisting of 20 square feet or more.

Place your order by phone by calling us at 888 260-7371 anytime today or tomorrow and we will phone you back as soon as we can.

Remember, our Cork mosaic tiles look beautiful on the floor or wall so act now to get the home you have always dreamed of using our eco-friendly tiles.

The producers of the TV show House Crashers which airs on the diy network have selected our Cork Mosaic Tiles as the flooring choice for an episode they titled “Bar Basement Lounge”. The show is scheduled to air this evening July 18th on the diy network at 6 p.m. EST so please tune in and let us know what you think.

Our cork mosaic tiles were chosen over many other materials for the homeowners basement area and we were both proud and pleased when we were notified that our tiles had been selected.

We would love for our customers and our friends to leave a comment below on our Blog to let us know what you think of the homeowners new look basement when you watch the show. Thank you as always for your continued support!

We love the look of our client’s new bathroom where she kindly chose several products from our “green” line of tiles including our Cork mosaic tiles for her bathroom floor and our Kaguya Bamboo subway 2 x 4 tiles in the Kansai color for the bathroom walls. This was mostly a DIY project where the homeowners did the work themselves and as we can all see the project came out great.

The client sent us some very helpful feedback on the installation of the two tile materials since the client kind of “learned as they went” due to the fact that they were not professional tile installers. As we write in our installation instructions on the AnchorBayTile website for each product, the client learned that it is really important to protect the material before and after grouting by applying a light coat of water-based polyurethane to the material which makes grout clean up quite a bit easier.

In the end, the client got the hang of the tile installation as the project progressed and we really do think that they did very nice work.

We hope that our cork mosaic tiles and our bamboo subway tiles together look enticing enough to our blog readers where you would consider using each of the two materials together in your upcoming tile project. If this is the case, please do give us a call since we would be willing to provide materials discounts to you in exchange for project photos.

Please give us a call at our office if you have an interest in our offer.

Ever wonder how Cork goes from Cork Tree to your Home as our Cork Mosaic Tiles. It is quite an interesting process and is a story worth telling. Read on for a little fun history of how Cork came to be used as a material in commerce.

Cork started being used in commerce way back in the late 1600’s by a name that many of you may be familiar with – Dom Perignon. Mr. Perignon was a French Benedictine monk at the time who adapted Cork materials to close bottles of sparkling wine. Fast forward four centuries later and as you all know wine corks have been considered the ultimate wine stopper since its cellular structure makes it easy to compress in to the neck of a bottle where it expands to form a tight seal.

Where does Cork actually come from?
To obtain cork material used to make cork products, Cork is harvested from the outer bark of cork oak trees, always by hand by workers using axes designed to slit the bark without harming the deeper layers of the tree. It can take two decades for a tree to grow old enough for the first harvest, and subsequent culling is done only once every nine or ten years. Most of the cork today is still used by the wine industry primarily, followed next by the shoe and fashion industries who are finding more and more uses for this wonderful material.

We use 100% post-industrial cork material that is not used by the wine industry in order to make our Cork mosaic tiles. We slice the corks and then shape them in to the penny round shapes which you see as our cork mosaic tiles. We have them professionally mesh-mounted for us and then sent to our warehouse for safe keeping before our kind customers decide to use our tiles for their home remodeling projects.

In a nutshell, a fairly straight-forward process from beginning to end and it has worked very well for many years. If we didn’t answer any questions you may have on the making of our Cork Mosaic tiles feel free to give us a shout and we will be glad to answer any additional questions that you may have.

We thought we would follow up our Friday post about using our Bamboo mosaic tiles and our Cork mosaic tiles with a photo of the Cork tiles installed. A product photo often doesn’t do any of our products justice but installation shots are really helpful in allowing a client to visualize what that product might look like in one’s own home.

If you are considering our offer to use our Bamboo mosaic tiles and our Cork mosaic tiles in your remodeling project we look forward to hearing from you.

Since we are on the subject this week about green building and green materials, we thought we would tell you about a wonderful architectural project completed by two ambitious and visionary Architects Anna Heringer and Eike Roswag.

The project sits in a town called Rudrapur which is in the northern part of densely populated Bangladesh. Historically, tradesman have had good access to local building materials such as earth and bamboo but they have been unable so far to put them to good use due to a lack of training and education on modern day building methods and skills.

The bamboo school project which was built in 2007 had a goal of using local building materials to construct a building with Earth (formed in to packed mud) and Bamboo while also training local tradesmen to build using modern building methods. The typical building in Bangladesh built by local tradesman will last on average for a period of 10 years. The architects assured all involved that this building would be sturdier and have a life of well over 10 years if the building plan was followed by the tradesman.

The outcome as one can see from the photos was a tremendous accomplishment and is one where all of those involved can be truly proud of the final result

Our new Bamboo tiles arrived yesterday and we are busy packing them away, preparing samples and getting the product ready to present on our website. The colors came out absolutely beautiful and the wait was well worth it. We will be introducing two new styles of Bamboo with both styles offered in two distinct colors.

Give us a little bit more time to get our act together and we will post pictures when the product is just about ready for prime time. We think you will agree when you see the new photos that the wait was definitely worth it.

Thank you for your patience and we appreciate all of the customers who trust us and support us by using our products on their remodeling and renovation projects.

A research team at UCLA has developed a website to assist folks whose project goal is to design an energy efficient home. The website is called Home Energy Efficient Design (HEED) and was developed by a UCLA research team headed by Murray Milne who is a research professor in the school’s department of architecture and urban design. Users of the free website will find it useful to design their sustainable home and at the same time calculate how much money and energy they will save with each design change.

The site generally is easy to use and a user only needs to enter the square footage of a home, number of stories, type (apartment or townhouse, etc.) and location to prompt the HEED site to create two homes with one serving as your base design and one to use as a comparison home and to test any changes to a design. The base design will meet California’s energy code which is one of the toughest codes in the US but users can also change the code to their state when using the site.

The HEED tool is quite powerful and using the floor planner allows one to explore door, window, heating, cooling, appliance, shading, and ventilation options. All of this in one relatively easy to use free tool. There is no technical support or customer service helpline but if you send an email to the HEED team they are committed to providing users with a response in a timely manner.

The $6 billion program dubbed by the media the cash for caulkers program passed the House last Thursday and now makes its way to the Senate later this summer. The bill, officially known as the Home Star Energy Retrofit Act has been touted by President Obama since late last year as a central piece of his job creation strategy.

The bill would fund rebates of as much as 50%, up to $3,000 for energy saving efforts such as insulation improvements and the replacement of windows, doors, heating and cooling systems. The installations will have to be completed by qualified contractors. The bill also covers reimbursements for those who perform comprehensive energy audits and reduce their home’s total energy consumption.

The House vote simply authorizes the creation of the program but it does not appropriate the funds needed to run it. The Senate will take up the legislation this summer and will determine how to pay for the program. The bill has the support of the National Association of Home Builders and the National Association of the Remodeling Industry as a much needed boost for their beleaguered industries that are experiencing significant downturns from the deep economic recession.