Residential building supplies market study: what will it reveal?

Building Today’s resident troublemaker Ross Middleton says while the good old plasterboard paradise is in abeyance, there is further irony in that the present pinch will punch profit and progress for everyone. The reality check is about to bounce, but where it bounces no one knows. I was born a boomer in the long shadow […] The post Residential building supplies market study: what will it reveal? appeared first on Building Today.

Don’t panic Captain Mainwaring!

Building Today columnist Ross Middleton sees a Dad’s Army irony in all the blather around Covid as it continues to disrupt. “Permission to speak sir . . .” If you are approaching a set of traffic lights anywhere in the world, turning red means stop. In Aotearoa though, it generally means speed the hell up […] The post Don’t panic Captain Mainwaring! appeared first on Building Today.

All about power

Ross Middleton says you can hardly produce a column called ‘Roof Irony’, continue ad-libbing about how hot it is up there, and not get around to discussing solar energy, its features and benefits, along with other more general energy issues. Discussing solar energy can’t happen without looking at the bigger pictures of energy supply, energy […]

Like a runaway climate change train on a downhill line

Ross Middleton says we might be a humble building industry magazine, but that doesn’t mean we have no room on the roof for Friedrich Nietzche, Joe Biden, David Bowie and Dr Martin Luther King Jr. When Bowie saw “the gathering omens of doom” and sang “five years, that’s all we’ve got”, on his breakthrough 1972 […]

Through the 3D glass, darkly

Feel the irony? Ross Middleton says building is in a boom but reckons the economic worm is turning while costs are heading one way fast, raw materials and products are increasingly hard to source, waste is now a major issue, and the warm moist air of the environment is breathing down our necks . . […]