In recent years, home modification has played an increasingly important role in the housing industry. Expenditures on renovation have consistently exceeded those spent on new home construction during the 1990s. And it has huge potential to continuously increase in the years to come. Renovators' do-it-yourself activities are efficient ways to fulfill homeowners' psychological and physical needs and save expensive labour costs. / This research investigates not only the technology evolution of ten products and the installation processes that are frequently used by renovators, but also the fundamental reasons that drive the development of these innovations. It covers the technology from the beginning of this century to the latest innovations developed by manufactures in the 1990s. Additionally, it documents recent national and Quebec renovation market trends, together with three post-occupancy studies which had been conducted in the Montreal Area. / The study reveals that many of the products and installation process have been greatly simplified and innovations in the renovation market could benefit renovators by allowing them to undertake modifications themselves. Also, the author suggests certain guidelines for increasing housing affordability and new products development.

MSc (Physics) / Department of Physics / Since the discovery of water photolysis on a TiO2 electrode by Fujishima and Honda in 1972, TiO2 has attracted extensive attention as an ideal photocatalytic material because of its excellent properties such as high activity, good stability, nontoxicity and low cost. Hence, it has been widely used in the fields of renewable energy and ecological environmental protection. However, as a wide band gap oxide semiconductor (Eg = 3.14 eV), brookite TiO2 can only show photocatalytic activity under UV light irradiation (λ < 387.5 nm) that accounts for only a small portion of solar energy (approximately 5 %), in contrast to visible light for a major part of solar energy (approximately 45 %). Therefore, effectively utilizing sunlight is the most challenging subject for the extensive application of TiO2 as a photocatalyst. Due to the unique d electronic configuration and spectral characteristics of transition metals, transition metal doping is one of the most effective approaches to extend the absorption edge of TiO2 to the visible light region. This method of doping either inserts a new band into the original band gap or modifies either the conduction band or valence band, improving the photocatalytic activity of TiO2 to some degree. In this work, the structural, electronic and optical properties of doped and undoped TiO2 (100), (110) and (210) surfaces were performed using first principle calculations based on DFT using a plane-wave pseudopotential method. The generalized gradient approximation was used in the scheme of Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof to describe the exchangecorrelation functional as implemented in the Cambridge Sequential Total Energy Package code in the Materials Studio of BIOVIA. The metal dopants shift the absorption to longer wavelengths and improves optical absorbance in visible and near- IR region. The un-doped (210) surface showed some activity in the visible and near IR region. / NRF

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