Do-It-Yourself

We don't believe that necessities such as good food, housing, and medical care should have anything to do with money. In some people's minds that makes us baby-eating, commie freaks. In reality what it makes us is poor because we spend a lot of time giving free advice. Our dream job would be to spend all our time helping eco-warriors, owner-builders, and (gasp!) people with very small budgets create good, green buildings.

However, until someone comes up with the funding for us to create a non-profit for that purpose, we must adhere to a disciplined approach to being paid for all of our green building work. We have spent a lot of time creating a plan for disseminating information that will be accessible to all, regardless of budget. If you are willing to spend some time and follow the steps below, you’ll gain the benefit of our combined knowledge and experience in an inexpensive, efficient manner:

Step 1. READ OUR BOOKS. Many of the questions we get are general in nature, or they are specific questions that reflect a misunderstanding of important underlying concepts. Rather than charging people hourly rates to answer the same questions over and over again, we’ve written two books that deal with the basics of green building. Click here to learn more.

Our books are an incredible bargain and represent a huge time investment on our part. Clarke alone has over three years of seven day weeks invested in them. They are basically our gift to you. We make an average of 75 cents($0.75) in total royalties on each book sold. If you can’t afford to buy them, check them out at the library. In other words, almost anyone considering a building project, no matter the scale, can access this information, the result of years of research and practical experience. If you take the time to read both of our books, you’ll know a HUGE amount, much more than many conventional contractors and architects, and will have much of the general information you need to move toward a successful green building

Step 2. ORGANIZE YOUR PROJECT: The design of your building project will be a process of applying this general information to the specifics of your situation. You can do a lot of this work yourself. In fact, you are the perfect person for the job because you are the source of the project. It resides in your imagination. The clearer you can imagine your project (new house, remodel, renovation…) in the context of the real world, nuts and bolts concepts outlined in our books, the less work you’ll need to hire someone else to do.

Step 3. CONTACT US. After this preparation, you’ll still have questions, lots of them, and that’s where we come in. By taking the time to learn some basics and apply them to your situation, your questions will be clearer and we’ll be able to answer them more quickly and inexpensively.

Email your questions/description of your situation/ whatever’s on your mind to you@thinkgreenbuilding. We'll evaluate your situation and respond with an estimate of how much it will cost for us to help you. We might ask specific questions to get more information or perhaps suggest a phone conference. In any case, we’ll work hard to get you the info you need as inexpensively as possible while still allowing ourselves to be paid for our time. We ALWAYS require some kind of payment in advance before doing any work. Our response email will explain how that works.

Email: you@thinkgreenbuilding.com

© Clarke Snell, 2005