Sean and Laura renovate their Black Mountain home

Sean and Laura renovate their Black Mountain home

Rhodo RenoLaura and Sean Sullivan decided to put Living Stone Construction’s design-and-build process to the test when they renovated their home in Black Mountain.

Sean, owner of Living Stone, and Laura, owner of ID.ology Interior Design, wanted to see how well their in-house process works for the many clients the award-winning team attracts. They bought an older home in a venerable neighborhood and treated themselves as clients.
Through work that raised the roof and added square footage in back, the Sullivans confirmed that Living Stone’s meticulously thought-out process makes renovating an existing home or building a new one as easy for clients as possible.

“I would say that we confirmed that our process does work,” Sean said. “It works very well. And we learned some things along the way to improve the process of our clients going forward.”

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Six Ways To Make Your House Plan Energy Efficient

Submitted by Sean D Sullivan, President, Living Stone Construction Inc.
Few things in life can be as exciting — and equally daunting — as building a new house. Throughout the design and construction process, there are multitudes of decisions to consider that will affect the final cost.

“Final cost.” It’s a phrase we associate with the sum total of all the labor and material costs that go into building a new house. But in reality, the final cost of your new house will continues to tally up long after you move in. Perhaps we should think of it as your home’s ongoing cost.

Of course there will be maintenance, taxes, neighborhood association fees and the like, but the main contributor to your home’s ongoing cost will be its consumption of energy. With that in mind, here are six practical ways to help minimize the future ongoing costs of your new house before it’s even built.

1. Choose High-Performance Windows and Solar Screens

One of the most effective ways to cut your home’s energy consumption is to install high-performance windows. Be sure to select windows with spectrally selective glazing or qualified films that “bounce

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