THE RETROFIT & REMODEL FIELD GUIDE — THE NIGHTMARE
Before You Open Up a Wall, Find Out What the Building Is Trying to Tell You.
THE RETROFIT & REMODEL FIELD GUIDE — THE NIGHTMARE is built around a simple idea: before you ever open up a wall, roof, ceiling or rim joist, find out what the building is telling you and why it happened.
Moisture. Mold. Rot. High energy bills. Bad repairs. Hidden damage.
What you can see may only be the symptom.
The real problem may be buried inside the wall, above the ceiling, below the floor, behind the siding, or inside decisions made decades ago.
A Carbonless Field Guide to Understanding the Building You Already Own
New construction starts with a clean sheet of paper.
Retrofit and remodeling starts with somebody else’s decisions.
Sometimes those decisions were made five years ago. Sometimes fifty. Sometimes more than a hundred.
And sometimes five different people changed the same building without knowing what the person before them had done.
This Field Guide helps you understand what you inherited before you spend money changing it.
Learn to slow down, observe the evidence, identify the root cause, and understand how one repair can affect the rest of the building.
Because replacing rotten wood without fixing the moisture source doesn't solve the problem.
Removing mold without understanding why it grew doesn't solve the problem.
Adding insulation without understanding air, moisture, and temperature can create a new problem.
Before you rebuild it, understand it.
THE RETROFIT & REMODEL FIELD GUIDE — THE NIGHTMARE
Real buildings. Real problems. Real lessons.
For homeowners, remodelers, builders, tradespeople, inspectors, mold professionals, and anyone trying to understand an existing building before they start tearing it apart or putting it back together.
Find the cause. Understand the building. Put it back together better.
What you can’t see can cost you.
What's Inside The Nightmare
Nobody has ever called me about a retrofit because they were having a good day. Usually something already happened. They found mold. They smell mildew. The utility bills are ridiculous. Water is showing up where it doesn't belong. Somebody opened a wall and found something they weren't expecting. Or nothing is wrong at all, and they just want to add a bedroom without buying a second furnace to heat it.
This field guide is about the building you already own. With new construction, you get to decide how the building goes together. With a retrofit or remodel, somebody else already made those decisions. Sometimes five different people remodeled the same house, and none of them knew what the person before them had done. This book teaches you how to find out what you really have before you spend the money. Diagnose before you prescribe.
It isn't only about houses. Additions, apartments, schools, offices, restaurants, warehouses and factories all have one thing in common: the building is already there.
What you will learn
How to read a building from the outside. The snow on the roof, the grade, the gutters and the siding all leave clues.
Why buying insulation is not the same as buying a thermal break.
The control layers for water, air, vapor and heat, and why one good detail doesn't fix the whole building.
Why one hole is still a hole, from a single wire penetration to a punctured slab vapor barrier.
How framing is a highway for heat around your insulation, and why steel is the expressway.
Red flags to watch for, like spray foam directly against metal and outside walls used as mechanical chases.
Real projects, including the Tstud® fish shack that got too tight, the three-season porch that became part of the house, and five different water-resistant barriers on one house.
The Nightmare House
The second half of the book follows one real house. Nothing looked that bad. The hardwood floors shined. The kitchen worked. There were finished bedrooms, bathrooms and recessed lights. But the house didn't happen all at once. It was a two-story house with four additions, built by different builders in different years with different materials.
Then the walls came open. Every time they opened something, it got worse. Four months in, the plan to fix only the inside was gone. The windows, the exterior, the roof and the walls all had to be addressed. You walk through it in real photographs and thermal images, one layer at a time, so you can learn to see the clues in your own building before you open the walls.
This book will never be finished
That is on purpose. Every six months, Carbonless intends to add more real photographs, failures, repairs and lessons from real buildings. When we know what happened next, we'll show you. When we don't know, we'll tell you that too.
Hardcover, 8.5 x 11, full color. Published by Beevland Publishing. Digital PDF edition also available.
What You Get:
Complete Guide (DIGITAL PDF) with 150+ Photographic References
A Guide that Teaches You HOW to Think… Not Just WHAT to Think.
A FULL walkthrough of building the Carbonless Standard Implemented into a Retrofit & Remodel Project
For NEW Construction you want How to Build a Super Energy Efficient and Healthy Home Field Guide
DOCUMENTED THROUGHOUT THE FIELD GUIDE
These aren’t theories. They’re real buildings, real problems, and real evidence.
A remodeled 1928 Craftsman still costing its owners approximately $800 per month to heat and cool.
A heavily insulated roof still producing enormous icicles—along with approximately $500 per month in winter heat-tape costs.
A three-season porch converted into approximately 168 square feet of conditioned living space without increasing the owner’s utility payment.
A highly efficient shop testing at approximately 0.25 ACH50.
A tiny experimental building made so airtight that even the wood stove needed a deliberately designed source of combustion air.
And The Nightmare—a house with approximately $800 monthly utility costs, an initial $46,000 HVAC replacement estimate, and thousands of photographs documenting what was discovered when the walls finally came open.
Every building was trying to tell us something.
The question is whether we recognize the evidence before we cover it back up.
Find the cause. Fix the cause. Then put the building back together better.
The Wall Is Open. Don’t Waste the Opportunity.
Maybe you planned to remodel the kitchen.
Replace the siding.
Finish the basement.
Build an addition.
Replace the roof.
Or maybe the building forced your hand.
You found mold. Smelled mildew. Discovered water. Felt a floor sag. Found rot. Or opened a utility bill you could no longer ignore.
Once the building is open, you have something incredibly valuable: evidence.
Now you can see where the water went.
Where the air was moving.
What somebody buried behind the wall.
Whether the insulation is actually doing its job.
Whether the air, water, vapor, and thermal control layers connect—or stop somewhere they shouldn't.
And most importantly:
You have an opportunity to find the cause before you cover it back up.
Whatever you put into that wall today may stay there for another 50 or 100 years.
Don't simply make it look new.
Understand what failed. Fix the cause. Put it back together better. Then close the wall.
The Symptom Is Not the Diagnosis.
Mold is evidence.
Rot is evidence.
A wet crawlspace is evidence.
A cold floor is evidence.
Icicles are evidence.
Condensation is evidence.
An uncomfortable room is evidence.
A high utility bill is evidence.
But the symptom doesn't necessarily tell you the cause.
That's where retrofit and remodeling can go wrong.
Replace the HVAC system without understanding the load—and the problem may remain.
Add insulation without understanding air and moisture movement—and you may create a new problem.
Remove mold without finding the moisture source—and it may come right back.
Diagnose before you prescribe.
Before you replace equipment, add insulation, seal something up, or close another wall, understand how water, air, vapor, and heat are actually moving through the building.
Find the evidence.
Find the cause.
Fix the cause.
Then put the building back together better.
Because the building gets the final vote.
This Is More Than a Collection of Remodeling Problems.
At first glance, THE NIGHTMARE is filled with photographs of buildings coming apart.
Walls opened up.
Roofs failing.
Mold, moisture, rot, air leaks, bad transitions, hidden damage, and repairs that did not solve the real problem.
But this guide is about much more than what went wrong.
It is about learning how to read the evidence.
How to understand what the building is telling you.
How to find the cause instead of just treating the symptom.
And how to make better decisions before everything gets covered back up again.
The failures are the lesson.
THE FIELD GUIDE TEACHES YOU HOW TO THINK.
Before you decide how to fix an existing building, learn how to investigate it.
Follow the water.
Find uncontrolled air movement.
Look for thermal bridges.
Understand where the building can dry and where moisture can get trapped.
Study the foundation, rim, walls, windows, doors, roof, and mechanical systems as parts of one connected building.
Then ask what happens if you change one of them.
Because changing insulation can change drying.
Changing windows can change air movement.
Changing the roof can change moisture behavior.
Changing the HVAC system can change humidity.
One change can affect everything around it.
The goal is not to memorize details.
The goal is to learn how to look at the whole building before you make the next decision.
THE PHOTOGRAPHS SHOW YOU WHAT WAS ACTUALLY THERE.
These are real buildings.
Real walls.
Real crawlspaces.
Real roofs.
Real framing.
Real moisture.
Real demolition.
Real additions.
Real mistakes.
And real discoveries that stayed hidden until somebody finally opened the building.
Some of these conditions had been buried for decades.
Once the wall comes open, the building starts telling you the truth.
The photographs in this guide are not there to make the book look good.
They are evidence.
They show what was found, where it was found, and what questions needed to be asked next.
Look closely. The building is telling you something.
THE FIELD MEASUREMENTS SHOW YOU WHAT FINISHES CAN HIDE.
A finished room can look perfect and still perform terribly.
Thermal imaging can reveal heat moving through framing and around openings.
Surface-temperature measurements can show where the building is gaining or losing heat.
Blower-door testing can expose air leakage you cannot see with your eyes.
Utility bills can show what all of those hidden problems are costing the owner every month.
A wall can look beautiful and still leak air.
A roof can contain plenty of insulation and still have major thermal pathways.
A remodel can look brand new and still leave the owner fighting the same building every month.
Pretty finishes do not prove good performance.
Measure it. Test it. Document it.
Then decide what the building actually needs.
THE CASE FILES SHOW YOU WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.
Some projects in this Field Guide are complete.
Others are still being rebuilt.
When Carbonless knows what happened next, we show it.
When only a recommendation is known, we say that.
When the building has not revealed the rest of the story yet, we say that too.
TO BE CONTINUED.
That is how real retrofit work happens.
Buildings do not always give you every answer on day one.
Sometimes you open the wall and find one problem.
Then that problem leads you to another.
Then you measure, test, repair, rebuild, and keep learning.
Real retrofit work does not wrap itself up neatly at the end of a television episode.
The case file stays open until the building tells us the rest of the story.
The book teaches the judgment. The spreadsheets let you test it.
Don’t Buy the Same House Twice.
You open the wall.
You spend the money.
You repair it.
You close it.
And ten years later, the same problem comes back because nobody corrected what caused it.
You just bought that wall twice.
Replace mechanical equipment without reducing the building load and you may buy the same energy problem twice.
Replace windows without understanding the surrounding air and water control and you may own beautiful new windows inside the same poorly performing enclosure.
Add insulation without understanding moisture and drying potential and the “improvement” can create an entirely new problem.
Retrofit is not about spending more money.
It is about spending money once, in the right order, on the actual problem.
That is Return on Efficiency™.
Hardcover
THE RETROFIT & REMODEL FIELD GUIDE: THE NIGHTMARE
DIGITAL EDITION | INSTANT DOWNLOAD
This listing is for the digital edition. No physical book will be shipped with this purchase.
Real Buildings. Real Failures. Real Solutions.
The Carbonless Retrofit & Remodel Field Guide is built from more than 25 real projects and consulting jobs from the last two years.
Nearly 200 field photographs take you inside existing homes and buildings to see what actually went wrong and what can be done differently.
This isn't a book filled with pretty finished rooms.
It's what you find when you open the building up.
Mold. Mildew. Rot. Water intrusion. Failed walls. Window problems. Air leaks. Moisture problems. Thermal bridges. Mechanical issues. Multiple hot-roof failures.
See the Problem Before You Try to Fix It.
Every photograph has a purpose.
The descriptions explain what you're looking at, why it happened, what building science principles are involved, and what should be considered before the building gets put back together.
You'll see examples from:
• More than 25 real projects and consulting jobs
• Nearly 200 field photographs with detailed descriptions
• Mold, mildew, and rot investigations
• Multiple hot-roof failures
• Exterior wall problems
• Window and opening failures
• Water and moisture intrusion
• Air leakage and thermal bridging
• Insulation and control layer problems
• Remodeling transitions between old and new construction
• Existing conditions that weren't discovered until the building was opened
• Repairs, corrections, and lessons learned in the field
Remodeling Is Your Second Chance.
New construction gives you one opportunity to get it right.
A remodel gives an existing building another opportunity.
Once the walls, roof, floors, windows, or other assemblies are opened, you have a chance to understand what failed and rebuild them to perform better.
The goal isn't simply to make an old building look new.
The goal is to make it more energy efficient, healthier, more comfortable, and more durable than it was before.
You Don't Have to Be a Building Scientist.
Brian Iverson has spent more than 50 years in construction, remodeling, design, energy auditing, development, real estate, and building performance.
This guide takes that experience, plus evidence from more than 25 recent real-world projects, and puts it into a visual format people can actually follow.
Homeowners. Remodelers. Builders. Architects. Drafts people. Inspectors. Mold remediation professionals. Tradespeople. Building performance professionals.
If you work on existing buildings, this guide was built for you.
Follow the pictures. Read the descriptions. Understand what failed. Learn why it failed. Then make a better decision before you close the building back up.
DIGITAL EDITION | $199
Instant digital download. No physical book will be shipped with this purchase.
Prefer a real book you can hold, mark up, and take to the jobsite? The hardcover edition is available separately below.
Find the cause. Understand the building. Put it back together better.
What you can't see can cost you.
This guide is educational material. It is not architectural plans, engineered drawings, code approval, or project-specific professional advice. Every building must be evaluated for its own existing conditions, site, climate, adopted codes, and requirements by appropriately qualified professionals.
Nearly 200 photographs. 25+ real projects. Nothing staged. Nothing hidden. Just real buildings teaching us how to build better.