Surprisingly, it’s not necessary or advisable to repair every defect in a house. Normally what I will do in that case is give a number of alternatives in my report and layout the pluses and minuses of each alternative. Many times it is flamingly obvious that repairing the house defect will cause more problems than…

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Abandoned Terminal

This past week Governor Gavin Newsom stated that California would ban gas powered cars in 15 years. Also, an article appeared in Forbes magazine on September 26. It is predicting that Tesla’s proposed $25,000 electric car would mean “Game Over” for gas and oil. That made me think. What happens when cars go electric to the…

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Container Houses

This video of shipping container house construction in Atlanta. It was the second one we designed in the City. It’s located in Old Fourth Ward, and is a very simple house, but it looks good. It was built in 2008. These videos show its construction when it was fairly close to completion. This is a…

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When we do structural investigations of old buildings, we find surprises.  However, I have never seen anything like this.  This was an old “shotgun” type house in West Atlanta that was being renovated.  We went to the site to make structural recommendations.  The house looked fairly normal at curbside, with the exception it had a…

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University Lofts was a project located in downtown Binghamton, NY. Originally, a department store was on the site, and the facade was left in place. There had been a serious fire inside of the building, so the entire inside had to be torn out and replaced. To rebuild it, it was decided to use cold…

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The Architect on this project was Travis Price Architects, and we (Runkle Consulting, Inc) were the Structural Engineers. The project is a three story apartment building built for student housing near Catholic University. It was challenging for us because it was such a short time frame. We started design in March, and the project was…

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