The Guide to LEED Building

A new book shares an honest account of a family’s experience building a LEED-certified home.

Forbes reports that Melissa Rappaport Schifman and her husband Jim decided to build a LEED-certified home after they toured a home for sale that was filled with mold and mildew.

The couple embarked on a journey that she says took almost three years and more of their time, energy and money than either of them imagined. In the end, they got the healthy home they desired, and Melissa wrote Building a Sustainable Home: Practical Green Design Choices for Your Health, Wealth, and Soul (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018) to help others find their way. Here’s what she told me about the process of creating the book and the house.

Melissa Rappaport Schifman: When I got our house LEED certified I was really the only person who cared about it. I started a blog and wrote about every single LEED credit in order to get through it and document it. Over the years, as I learned a lot more about the certification and in living in the home (which was completed in 2009), I came back to my level of frustration with all the guidebooks out there. They really throw everything at you, but I felt like they were missing the true story, the honest part of it that not everything is worth it. Not everything is great.

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