Friday, May 9, 2008

"Greening" the House

My ultimate goal for our home is to have it be environmentally friendly. For a lot of things, I'm not going to go spend money just for the sake of it. For example I'm not going to rip the carpet out and put in bamboo floors just because it's "green." I think that is a bit wasteful since the carpet is already in there. However, I am going to go that type of route when it comes time to replace the carpet (which may not be all that far off). So what have we done so far?

*When we moved in, the walls needed new paint, so we used low VOC paint throughout.
*I have replaced most of the lightbulbs with CFLs, although I'm holding back on a few spots because we might be replacing the lighting fixtures. One of the fixtures uses a dimmer, and the other has small lights, so I don't want to spend a lot of money buying these replacements, only to possibly end up with different needs later on.
*We recycle just about everything. I don't even bother to take the trash out to the curb every week because we generally only have 1 bag of actual garbage.
*I just took our lawn mower into a metal recycler and ordered a new electric mower.

When we moved in, there were a few things already in place:
*All of the windows are double-paned, and the insulation is awesome (the house is only 8 years old), so the house stays nice and cool. So far we've turned on the ceiling fans a handful of times, and have not used the air conditioning at all, and hopefully it stays that way!
*Almost all of our appliances are gas-powered.

I'm sure there are other things, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head right now. What are the goals for the future?

*When it comes time to replace the carpet, I know Erin wants hardwood in a lot of places, so we'll look into an environmentally friendly approach to this.
*When the hot water heater is ready to go, I want to put in a tankless heater.
*Solar panels on the house.

Obviously that last one is considerably more expensive, and we can survive without it, so it will probably have to be a ways off.

But that's where we are right now, and kind of an idea where we'd like to head in the future.

1 comment:

Hous said...

I think you should compost too. THink of all that food trash you won't throw out. Plus if you want to go fishing you'll have Tons of worms.