A Best Practice Guide and Plan Review Tool for Builders and Designers

This guide advances the goal of designing, building, and maintaining houses that manage moisture effectively. As with any goal, moisture-resistant housing requires decisions – decisions by designers, decisions by builders, decisions by remodelers, decisions by trades, and decisions by homeowners. Therefore, this guide is a resource for good decision making in applying moisture management best practices.

By making moisture-resistant best practices available in an easy-to-use form, a variety of the most common moisture-related problems in homes can be avoided. These problems include rain penetration, structural decay, mold growth, high indoor humidity, condensation, wet foundations, ice dams, and many others that are well known to builders, homeowners, and insurers. For the most part, these problems are preventable or controllable, but only if timely decisions are made and acted upon. While Benjamin Franklin's advice that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" was originally focused on preventing fires, it applies equally well to preventing moisture problems in homes.