Rare Earth Builders, Inc.
828/648-0009
5183 Beaverdam Road. Canton, NC 28716
E-mail Us: rareearthbldrs@bellsouth.net

This is an exciting time to be building your home and the mountains of western North Carolina are a magnificent place to do it. New and superior building materials and technologies and the continuing evolution of building science make the dream of building a home that is energy efficient, drop-dead beautiful and easy on the environment more possible than ever before.

• Insulated concrete forms now provide a strong, monolithic and highly insulative system particularly well-suited for below-grade basement walls.
• Aerated autoclaved concrete (Hebel or AAC) bestows a truly sculptural quality: allowing the builder to create arches, rounded corners, coved walls, vaults--you name it.
• Pigmented veneer plasters as finishes on the AAC add a warmth and life that a skin of latex paint can’t touch.
• Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs) are unrivaled in their ability to insulate and seal.
• Acid-stained concrete can turn a plain-Jane concrete slab into a work of art that resembles warm leather or a rich marble for about a third the cost of tile.

And now you can put the home to work by having it harvest from the sun much or all of the energy it needs to function. Water heated by the sun in collectors can provide both domestic hot water and space heating. Using passive solar design principles, a house collects the sun’s heat through its windows, stores the heat in its mass (dense materials such as concrete, stone and tile) and retains that captured energy with superior insulation and air-sealing. The Sun, and associates Wind & Water (hydro) can provide all or part of the electrical energy required by the home.