Our world is changing.

You know, we've been five years ago we wouldn't have put heat pumps in anything.

You know, now heat pumps are really prevalent in low-load homes.

And now they're talking about moving to CO2 systems, right, because of refrigerant loss and charges and, you know, that environmental impact.

Welcome to the Fine Home Building Pro Talk podcast, our regular discussion with building industry

professionals. This is Senior Editor Patrick McComb. Today I'm joined by architect Emily Motrim, of Motrim Architecture in Cumberland, Maine,

and host of the BS and Beer Show and the E3 podcast.

This is the second segment of our two-part interview.

You can find the Fine Home Building Pro Talk podcast and the original Fine Homebuilding podcast

at finehomebuilding.com slash podcast.

What are the challenges of being a woman architect in such a male-dominated slow-to-change industry?

The architect-builder relationship is often somewhat adversarial to begin with.

Is it worse for women?

And what can home building do to make itself more inclusive?

And I'll let you take whatever component of that question you want to first.

Yeah.

One, I think that I am lucky in a lot of respects because, as I mentioned, I grew up in a

farming community.

And when you're a farm, farm community,

it doesn't matter if you're a boy or girl, everybody works. Right. And so I had kind of a

different upbringing, right? My dad only had daughters and that didn't make any difference to him. Right.

And so I think I had a really good kind of background that said, it doesn't matter if this seems more challenging.

...