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14 Steps To A Green Home

In my ideal world, a green home is completely self-sufficient with absolutely no chemically-laden materials and able to be cooled and heated without electricity. It is big enough to give the residents plenty of elbow room, but not any larger than necessary.

In the real world, most people cannot afford to build a completely green home, or remodel the one they have to make it greener. However, as Greg Horn puts it in his book Living Green: A Practical Guide to Simple Sustainability, "Making a home safer and more sustainable place for you and your family is a matter of simple choices that can make a big difference."

The good news is, many of those choices are well within reach. And though the choices may seem insignificant, each one has a powerful effect on Creation. For example, making your home more energy-efficient means less electricity use, which means less exploitation of both people and land, and less pollution.

Here are fourteen steps you can take to create a green home.

6 no-brainer steps anyone can do toward a green home

1. Cut back on disposables, or eliminate them completely. In Living Green, Horn says,

If we all just used a glass instead of a water bottle and
a coffee mug instead of a Styrofoam cup, we would save
244 billion bottles and cups made from petrochemical-based
plastics from entering the U.S. waste stream each year.
(pp.75-76)

If you have a baby, try cloth diapers cloth diapers, at least for home use. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at how easy they are to take care of. Another alternative to conventional diapers are gDiapers, a green compromise between the plastic disposables and the cloth ones.

Use cloth napkins instead of paper; rags made from old underwear and T-shirts instead of paper towels. Women can even find online sources for reusable cloth menstrual pads.

2. Recycle. If you do nothing else, please, do this. Most cities in the U.S have curbside (or, in our case, alleyway) recycling. All you have to do is sort the recyclables and get them in their proper places. It's the most basic thing you can do in developing a green home.

Why bother recycling, you ask? Well, do you want your backyard to one day look like this?

landfill

Maybe you think that's an exaggeration, but the fact is we are quickly running out of place to dump our trash. And the resources of the earth won't last forever. Recycling is a great way to conserve some of those resources.

Wonder where all stuff goes? Carefresh brand small pet bedding is made from the fibers in cardboard that are too tough to recycle. I have a large storage bin made of 99% recycled plastic. Ed Begley, Jr. (all you children of the '80's remember him from St. Elsewhere, right?), has a white picket fence around his house made of recycled milk jugs.

Not too mention all the paper products available now that are made from recycled paper. Then there are aluminum cans, which, when recycled are made into--guess what?--more aluminum cans.

Purchase these products made from recycled materials and your green home becomes even greener.

3. Buy only Energy Star appliances. The EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy created the Energy Star program to decrease pollution created by electricity use. Appliances labeled with the Star work more efficiently than those not so labeled, saving you money and lessening the impact your energy use has on the Earth. A definite must for a green home.

4. Use nontoxic cleaning supplies. I address this topic in more detail in this article. Most conventional house cleaning formulas contain chemicals that can cause, or contribute to, many health problems. Use soap nuts instead of laundry detergent (I can attest to the fact that they are fabulous cleansing agents). Vinegar and water instead of floor cleaners. Diluted liquid castile soap and tea tree oil instead of commercial disinfectant. Now you'll have a clean green home. ;-)
creation stewardship

5. Conserve water. Residents of a green home respect the fact that clean water is a limited resource.

Some ideas:

Shower or bathe only every other day.
When you shower, turn the water off to lather up. Even better, experiment with not using any soap, which is unnatural for our skin, anyway.
Turn off the tap while brushing, shaving, scrubbing pots, etc.
Use a broom on the garage floor instead of the hose.
When you shower, fill up a five-gallon bucket with the cold water while you're waiting for it to warm up. Use the water to water plants or flush the toilet. Which reminds me...
Convert all the toilets in your house to a low-gallon flush. Rather than replacing your 5-gallon flushing toilets, you can simply put a few bricks in the tank so that it fills up with less water.

6. Turn off lights and appliances when not in use. A learned skill, but once you train yourself and your family members to do this, it becomes yet another energy and money saver.

8 slightly more advanced steps to a green home

7. Install a programmable thermostat. If you don't yet have one, they can be found at any home-improvement store. If you have one and are not using all its features, begin today, and move to a new level of living in your green home.

With this kind of thermostat, you can tell your heating/cooling unit what temperature you want your house at which time of day. For example, in the summer you can program it to be 72 degrees at night, 75 degrees in the morning and evening, and 78 degrees during the day for when you aren't at home.

Since you may save up to 8% on your energy bill for every two degrees of thermostat change, having a programmable thermostat that remembers to make the changes for you is a great investment.

On weekends, don't forget to turn the system off when you go out to run errands. The temperature in your house won't change that much in a couple of hours, and you will save even more.

8. If you live in a nonrural area, consider buying an air purifier. In the Dallas metro area, where I live, our summers are filled with ozone alert days. On those days, when there is more pollution in the air and the air has an unpleasant aroma about it, I can only tell if I actually go outside. The air purifiers we have run 24/7, use little energy, and keep the inside of our home smelling like mountain air.

The best air purifiers will not only eliminate odors, but germs and pet dander as well, and are known to reduce allergies. The air purifier I recommend above all other is the Airwise air purifier.

9. Insulate your home. This simple move can save you up to 15% on your utility bills. Be careful what you use for insulation, however. Ninety percent of houses in the U.S. are insulated with fiberglass, which contains asbestos.

Yes, you read that correctly. Even though the EPA began a push to rid the world of the cancer-causing material decades ago, it still exists in almost every American household.

The green home alternative is Green Fiber insulation, made of 85% recycled paper fiber. The flame resistant treatment is non-corrosive and eco-friendly. One application lasts a lifetime of energy bill savings and reduced noise.

Consider saving up to have your fiberglass insulation removed and Green Fiber installed in its place.

10. Buy sustainable and/or nontoxic floor coverings. I wish I would have researched my choices on wood floors before we had the carpet ripped out of the house we'd just purchased.

But I was pregnant, sick, and exhausted, and just wanted everything in place before the baby came. So we had unsustainably harvested wood stained with toxic chemicals put down on our floors. (Hey, give me a break; I wasn't The Crunchy Coach^TM back then.)

I've learned better since then. Here are some flooring alternatives for your green home, the first two courtesy of The Green Book by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen.

Bamboo for hardwood. It grows back in less than seven years, thus can be continually harvested. If every hardwood floor purchased this year were bamboo, an 8-acre forest of old-growth trees would be saved.
Linoleum instead of vinyl. Linoleum is all-natural, whereas vinyl is made of petroleum-derived plastic. According to the authors of The Green Book, "If just 1 percent of the hard-surface flooring sold in the United States per year were linoleum instead of vinyl, the oil saved would equal six hundred thousand barrels...." (p.134)
Cork flooring. Harvesting cork does not require the destruction of trees, only the removal of bark. Also, it is softer than hardwood, making it easier to stand on for long periods of time.
Recycled carpet. Synthetic carpets contain harmful chemicals. Manufacturers will tell you that outgassing will be undetectable after 48-72 hours; however, some people, including children, are sensitive to the chemicals long after. A better choice is carpet made from recycled plastic.
Natural fiber rugs. You can get them in such materials as wool, cotton and sisal. Word to the wise: sisal is best used in a low traffic area, or in kid-free homes. Dirt and food pieces that get entangled in sisal's tightly knit fibers are impossible to remove. (Hear the voice of experience...)

11. Buy sustainably-made or second-hand furniture. Take it from me--you can get some nice stuff from consignment stores! Not only is it much cheaper than new, but you reduce the pollution caused by manufacturing plants and prevent wasting precious resources. Furthermore, you don't have to worry about the outgassing that comes from new furniture, especially that made with chemicals like formaldehyde.

Sustainably-made furniture is pricey, but if you take the steps above to reduce your utility bills you may find it easier to shell out for a more environmentally-friendly product. And you will be well on your way to the epitome of a green home.

12. Use paint with low- and zero VOCs (volatile organic compounds).
These types of paints are much more accessible and much better quality than the "green" paints of just a few years ago. I was pleasantly surprised when I called Lowes Home Improvement Warehouse a few months ago and they told me that, yes, they carry zero-VOC paints.

If you are painting a bedroom or a piece of furniture that is unlikely to get wait, milk paint is an even less toxic. In fact, when I painted a room with milk paint a few years ago, I didn't even wear gloves, and washing it off was a breeze! (And, yes, it smelled like fresh milk.)

13. As your old incandescent light bulbs go out, replace them with CFLs or LEDs. Compact flourescent lights have some controversy attached to them, as they contain a small amount of mercury. However, they last many times longer than incandescents and are much cheaper than LED (light emitting diode) bulbs.

CFLs may need to be handled with care; however, how many of you out there play baseball with your incandescents? Whichever one you choose, you will save lots of money and lots of power when you begin to use them in place of the "nongreen" bulbs.

14. Use nontoxic bedding. A truly green home should have bedrooms free of chemicals. Keetsa.com sells a variety of nontoxic mattresses. Gaiam.com sells luxurious organic cotton bedding. I found some non-chemical sheets at home department store several years ago. They aren't organic, but they are 100% cotton and free of all dyes and bleach.

May I coach you? These are just some of the options you have in turning your home into a green home. Choose even just three or four, and you will make a significant positive impact on your health, your family's health, and the health of the environment.

Discover the secrets t a vibrant, disease-free life. Click here.

Looking for resources and products to help you "green" your life and enhance your health? Visit
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