Water is the enemy of historic buildings. Water rots wooden building materials and causes metal ones to rust. By saturating masonry and subsequently freezing – and expanding – water can cause the masonry to spall or break apart. It is a necessary ingredient for mold growth, which is a health hazard, and further degrades building materials. And, it attracts insects. If you do nothing else, it is critical to make your building weathertight, keep a sound coat of paint or stain on wooden building materials exposed to weather, and guard against interior leaks. Following these steps will help you avoid the need to make much more expensive repairs in the future.
A simple story illustrates the point. The toilet in a guest bathroom is
not often used, and no one noticed that the toilet tank bolts were corroded. Eventually, the motion of the tank broke the bolts. Water from the tank ?ooded the bathroom, which is on the second ?oor above the master bedroom. The water leaked through the tile ?oor and wooden joists to the face of the drywall on the master bedroom ceiling. The cost of drying out the framing, removing the damaged drywall and replacing it, not to mention repairing the toilet, was in the thousands. If my friend had known that this was a relatively common problem and had checked the bolts regularly, he could have replaced the bolts with new fasteners for less than $10 and saved himself quite a bit of money and aggravation. While a frustration, the damage is now repaired, and the house is as good as new.
If my friend owned a historic home, however, the leak might have ruined an original plaster ceiling or wooden ?oorboards – a much sadder outcome.
The Trust for Architectural Easements is one of the nation’s largest non-profit organizations dedicated to voluntary preservation through easement donations. The Trust protects more than 800 historic buildings across the United States.View the original article here
PRLog (Press Release) - Aug 04, 2011 - Some companies spend tens of thousands of dollars on the bottled water, even in these difficult economic times. While cuts are being made in other areas of business operation the cooler is overlooked. In addition to the invoice cost of the water the cooler costs businesses money in several other ways. Employee down time spent taking deliveries, switching out bottles, tedious accounting time spent keeping up with the ever changing bill amounts and the risk of time loss and law suits from on the job injuries caused by handling the 40+ pound bottles. Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of these coolers... the wasted space on storing the bottles. Some companies have an entire room devoted to storage of the big plastic jugs. In NYC where real estate prices are sky high there is actually a significant cost related to storing these archaic bottles... again overlooked.