Healthy and Comfortable

Our Story:

Building a great home takes teamwork. The Home Sweet Home Competition is about recognizing the excellent teams of people and products already at work building “sweet” homes across Ontario. Similarly, the Home Sweet Home Student Challenge is about encouraging emerging talent coming forward from our Colleges and Universities to help us build even better homes tomorrow. So, what’s a “sweet home”? We’re glad you asked! Though ecological performance is at the heart of every Home Sweet Home award, today’s “green” homes are far more than just environmentally superior.

A sweet home is…

Healthy and Comfortable

Healthy and Comfortable             Shelter as it should be. Avoids toxic substances, reduces asthma and allergy symptoms and is a good fit with your lifestyle, identity and values. A tight building envelope and other design features ensure residents enjoy a comfortable, steady temperature, with fresh air and no drafts.

Efficient and Economical              

Efficient and Economical               Waste not, want not. Durable products and quality workmanship that increase energy, water, and materials efficiency, resulting in lower total monthly bills. Includes flexible designs aimed at making future renovations less expensive. Wise choices that deliver the best bang for the buck.

Ethical  

Ethical   A home that feels good inside and out. Incorporates quality technologies and design techniques that conserve habitat, water, and energy, and reduce waste and pollution. Uses locally sourced products wherever feasible to reduce the climate impacts of long-distance transport. Prefers socially just materials and labour to ensure a fair livelihood for all.

History

The idea for Home Sweet Home sprouted in 2008 during the research and development of OntarioGreenSpec.ca. OntarioGreenSpec.ca is an online directory that was founded by Mindscape Innovations Group (Mindscape) in response to the overwhelming demand for information about green building products and services to serve Ontario’s growing green building market. Mindscape, experts in green building consulting and certification, developed OntarioGreenSpec.ca as a free directory for use by the public and industry. While researching companies to add to OntarioGreenSpec.ca, we decided these companies deserved more profile. A competition and awards event is a fun way to invite Ontario’s green building leaders to step into the spotlight and strut their stuff.

Goal

True to the scope of OntarioGreenSpec.ca, we decided to let the competition showcase the full range of people and products that enable green building and renovating in Ontario, and so we designed Home Sweet Home to focus on an end product: a home. Just as OntarioGreenSpec.ca is a useful resource because it brings carefully chosen categories of information together into one convenient place, Home Sweet Home is unique in that it celebrates the “coming together” that happens in quality building projects. The whole (in this case, the home) is always greater than the sum of the parts. By recognizing teamwork, Home Sweet Home aims to encourage industry-wide innovation and excellence.

Niche

What’s the difference between this competition and Ontario’s other prestigious and established green building awards offered by great organizations like the Ontario Home Builders Association, Sustainable Architecture & Building Magazine, the Ontario Association of Architects, and others? To be clear, we love those competitions, and applaud the organizers and competitors alike. But we saw some gaps that we plan to fill. Here are four things that make Home Sweet Home unique:

    Province-wide and Cross-Sectoral in Scope Many of the established awards competitions are either national or regional in scope, so we wanted to provide something at the provincial scale. Further, while there are some great Ontario-wide green building awards, they are typically sector-specific (design, construction, wood, steel, landscaping, etc). We believe that great homes come from great teamwork, where the sum is greater than all the parts, so we also wanted to create a competition that involves the whole team, rather than any particular group of people involved in its creation. Everyone involved in building or renovating a Home Sweet Home award winner will be able to take credit for playing his or her part. Builders, designers, trades-people, producers and suppliers will all be Home Sweet Home winners.

    Showcasing Ontario Talent OntarioGreenSpec.ca exists to shine a bright light on the great products and services available to Ontario’s high performance builders, and to serve Ontario’s green building sector. As such, Home Sweet Home promotes the use of “home-grown” materials. Not only does a competition entrant need to be located in Ontario, the judging criteria also gives cumulative points for Canadian, Ontarian, and local (within 800km) content, with triple points when the products in the home come from your region of Ontario.

    Comparing Apples with Apples We were hearing from various builders that they just couldn’t compete against others whose projects were radically different from their own. Home Sweet Home seeks to give everyone in the low-rise home building/renovating industry a fair shot at a prize using the following four prize categories: Production Home of the Year; Custom Home of the Year; Affordable Home of the Year; and Renovated Home of the Year

    Student Challenge The Student Challenge is still under development (pilot Challenge begins Fall 2010) but its aleady attracting amazing support and interest from Ontario’s green building, design, and renovation industries and the academic community alike. The Student Challenge will build bridges between the practical wisdom and business enthusiasm of today’s green building leaders, and the fresh ideas and research resources of students. A joint Student Challenge Advisory Board is already hard at work, figuring out how to create these intersections for the benefit of all. 

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