Mark Johnson Custom Homes Blog

St. James, NC luxury home builder Mark Johnson Custom Homes is excited to share that the town of St. James will be breaking ground on a new town hall and community center expected to be completed in August 2010. Teresa A. McLamb of the Greater Wilmington Business Journal covered the story last week; below is an excerpt from her article and to read more, click here!

 “[Walt] Madsen said the town purchased the 13-acre tract from Brunswick County in 2007 for $490,000. About six acres of the tract is wetland. The remaining seven acres will be home to an 8,200-square-foot town hall and a 13,560-square-foot community center. Standing side-by-side, the single story buildings will be connected by a 30’ x 50’ pavilion that can be used for outdoor events.

The town hall layout includes a lobby, council chambers, town offices and separate offices that will be leased to the St. James POA.

The community center will have a large assembly room that can seat 385 for dinner or 730 people in theater style. It will also house a craft room, three meeting rooms, a catering kitchen and the director’s office. Madsen said the town plans to hire a director at the beginning of summer ‘to come on board in the final stages of construction.’ The director will coordinate classes and events in the building.”

Courtesy of: WilmingtonBiz.com

As both a proud member of the National Association of Home Builder and a Green home builder, Wilmington, NC luxury home builder Mark Johnson Custom Homes would like to share with our readers a recent press release from the NAHB. Below is the complete press release on “Project ReEnergize”, a program that was addressed at the NAHB’s International Builders’ Show aimed to generate Green jobs and weatherize homes.

“January 21, 2010 – A weatherization program that created jobs while it made homes more energy-efficient worked in Minnesota – and can be one model for successful programs in other states.

A remodeler, a window manufacturer and the executive officer for the Builders Association of Minnesota explained how ‘Project ReEnergize’ worked during a press conference on Wednesday at the National Association of Home Builders’ International Builders’ Show.

As part of its economic stimulus package, the Obama Administration made money available to state agencies for the purpose of weatherizing homes and generating jobs.

When some Minnesota agencies could not disburse the funding quickly enough, the state turned to the home builders association, which quickly trained and certified contractors and insulation installers to make improvements to 1,400 homes, said Pam Perri Weaver, BAMN’s executive officer.

Consumers were eligible for rebates when they hired certified contractors to replace windows, but they received even more money if their home’s insulation was upgraded as well. That was an important incentive because it’s hard to convince home owners to make improvements that in the end, they can’t see, said Minnesota remodeler Shawn Nelson, a Project ReEnergize participant. ‘Air sealing is not a visual upgrade,’ he said.

About 90 percent of the windows in today’s homes are older, single-pane glass styles – much less efficient than modern double-pane, triple-pane and argon-filled products, noted Maureen McDonough of Andersen Windows. A new federal energy-efficiency tax credit and supplying windows for Project ReEnergize contractors were important factors in enabling the manufacturer to call back 600 employees who had been laid off, she added.

Participating home owners had no income limits, but the homes could be no larger than 3,000 square feet and had to be built before the year 2000, when more stringent state energy codes were mandated. The average size of each home was 1,800 square feet and the average age was about 45 years old, Weaver said.

The home builders association stands ready to funnel more money to consumers to make upgrades should additional federal funding become available. ‘We have a list of people who are waiting,’ because most consumers are unwilling to make the upgrades without the financial incentives, Nelson said.”

Courtesy of: www.nahb.org

New Hanover County, NC Green home builder Mark Johnson Custom Homes would like to share with our readers a recent blog post from Michael V. Copeland, a senior writer for FORTUNE Magazine. In the post he examined the growing popularity of LED lights for both residential and commercial use. Below is an excerpt from the article and to read more, click here!

“The $100 billion global lighting industry is undergoing radical change: New office buildings and retail outlets are abandoning fluorescent lighting in favor of LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, those tiny, energy-efficient, long-lasting, and blindingly bright points of light. Giants such as GE (GE) and Philips are shifting production from incandescent bulbs to LEDs. Even the local Home Depot (HD) — which today probably stocks only a couple of LED lighting products — will soon carry a bouquet of LED bulbs, ultimately edging out fluorescents and halogen lamps. By the end of the decade, analysts predict, LEDs will be the dominant source for commercial and residential lighting.

LEDs, which are based on a technology similar to that of computer chips, have more in common in their design and manufacture with your laptop than with the incandescent bulb that Thomas Edison patented almost 130 years ago. As lighting goes digital, the industry is likely to encounter some of the same upheaval that took place when television, music, and other businesses shifted away from analog technologies.

Lighting is dominated by three enormous global companies: General Electric, Germany’s OSRAM (makers of Sylvania products), and the Dutch company Philips. But with LEDs coming on strong, the industry is now opening up to companies such as Samsung, LG, and Panasonic (PC), which have expertise in semiconductors.

‘From where I sit, lighting is undergoing the same transition that the film business did when digital cameras first came out,’ says Chuck Swoboda, CEO of Cree (CREE), a publicly traded LED manufacturer and lighting-systems company based in Durham, N.C. ‘I think the writing is on the wall for older types of lighting technologies. It’s just a question of how quickly we make it happen.’”

Courtesy of: CNNMoney.com