Resilient Home Design: A BS and Beer Recap of Ben Bogie and Michael Maines

What Happens When Two BS and Beer Co-Hosts Start Talking Resilience?

Usually, something useful.

In this case, it turned into the start of a thought leadership series from two of our own. Ben Bogie and Michael Maines, two of the four co-hosts behind BS and Beer, have teamed up to dig into a question that has been hanging around a lot more jobsite conversations lately. What does it mean to build a resilient home now?

That question can go sideways fast if you let it stay vague. “Resilience” gets used for a lot of things. Backup power. Better filtration. Storm prep. Smoke season. Durability. Heat. Wet weather. Outages. Sometimes all at once. By the time people are done tossing the word around, it can mean almost anything, which usually means it is not helping much.

Ben and Michael do a better job with it than that.

They both come at the topic from different sides of the work, which is what makes this collaboration worth reading. Michael takes the design side. Ben takes the builder side. Same subject. Different vantage point. And because they know the work from the inside out, neither one drifts into hand-wavy resilience talk or gadget worship.

They stay where BS and Beer is usually at its best anyway. In the real stuff. The stuff that holds up. The stuff that bites you later if you get lazy.

Michael’s piece is the design-side look at resilient home design. It is about early decisions, priorities, and what needs to get sorted before a project gets too far down the road. He gets into enclosure, stormwater, ventilation, filtration, backup planning, and the fact that resilience is rarely one magic feature. It is a set of decisions that need to work together.

Ben’s piece picks up from there and takes it into the field. He is focused on execution, sequencing, verification, and long-term serviceability. In other words, the part where good ideas either survive contact with real life or start getting chipped away by a hundred small compromises. That is a very Ben angle, and it is a good one. A house is not especially resilient if every equipment swap, late change, or future repair makes it a little worse.

Read together, the two pieces do something useful. They take resilience out of the buzzword bucket and put it back where it belongs. In the house itself.

That means the enclosure matters. Water management matters. Ventilation and filtration matter. Backup power matters too, but usually after you get clear on what the house needs to do and what “livable” means when conditions are not normal. It also means durability is not just about tough materials or low-maintenance finishes. It is about whether the whole system can keep performing over time without getting quietly wrecked by the next round of service work.

That is also why this pairing feels like such a natural fit for BS and Beer.

If you have watched the show for any amount of time, you already know the best conversations usually happen when somebody brings the design logic, somebody else brings the field reality, and the group keeps pulling the idea back toward physics, tradeoffs, and what actually works. This collaboration has that same energy. Michael helps define the priorities. Ben keeps asking whether those priorities will still hold together once the drawings hit the jobsite and the years start stacking up.

A few themes come through pretty clearly in both pieces.

One is that resilient home design starts with the house, not with a shopping spree. That does not mean equipment does not matter. Some of it matters a lot. It just means the big wins usually come from getting the fundamentals right first. A strong enclosure buys time during an outage. Good water management helps the house stay durable through weather that is getting less predictable. Thoughtful ventilation and filtration shape whether the house stays comfortable and livable when the outdoor air is full of smoke or other junk.

Another is that resilience gets clearer when you stop talking about it in the abstract and start asking what the house will actually do. If the power is out for three days, what keeps running? What can coast? What needs backup, and what just needs the building to stay stable long enough that a bad stretch does not turn into a crisis? If smoke hangs around for a week, can the house keep the indoor air under control without creating a bunch of new problems? Those are better questions than just asking whether a house is “resilient.”

The other thread worth paying attention to is the long game. Ben hits this especially well, but it runs through Michael’s piece too. Houses do not stay frozen in time. Filters need to be changed. Equipment gets replaced. Somebody adds a penetration. Somebody moves a line set. Somebody has to get in and work on something. If the house only performs well as long as no one touches it, that is not much of a resilience plan.

That is part of why this series feels like a good fit for the broader BS and Beer crowd. It respects the fact that resilience is not a code checkbox, not a product category, and not a single upgrade. It is a systems question. And as usual, control layers are still the plot.

So if you want the design-side read on how to think about resilient home design early, before the project gets boxed in, start with Michael’s piece.

If you want the builder-side read on what actually holds up in the field, how resilience gets lost during execution, and why serviceability belongs in the conversation from the start, read Ben’s piece right after.

That overlap is where the good stuff is.

Read Michael Maines’ design-side article HERE

Read Ben Bogie’s builder-side article HERE

This is exactly the kind of rabbit hole we like around here. Building science, real-world decisions, and just enough perspective from both sides of the work to keep the conversation honest.