These days, essentially everybody wants their building to be more efficient. But there are still barriers to achieving high efficiency and constructing a high-performance building.

There are many obstacles contractors face when working on these types of projects, including everything from educating owners to following through on building operation.

It takes a bit of ingenuity and a healthy dose of elbow grease to transform a 30,000-square-foot abandoned Sears auto center into a 91-point LEED Platinum certified office space, but that is exactly what Bremerton, Wash.-based Rice Fergus Miller (RFM) Architecture did.