Green Remodeling: Using Natural Building Materials in Your Remodeling Projects

Remodeling is an inside or an outside job. Whether one would like to make changes for the interior of one's home, or add charm to a walkway or patio, green remodeling is easily the most economic and eco-friendly best option. Natural building materials may be anything from salvaged barn wood to pervious concrete.
The best advice with an eco-friendly remodeling project would be to select natural materials which can be locally available. Building materials can result from all over the world to make it on the local home improvement box store. That means extreme fossil fuel usage, associated pollution, lack of regard for local businesses, and quite often abusive labor practices. Using a beautiful dark wood like wenge to develop a countertop might sound appealing, but simply because this wood can only be found in West Africa, we're talking a great deal of air miles. Finding building materials locally, eradicates those socially unconscious characteristics.
Visit locally-owned hardware stores, find woods that were harvested from inside the region, or visit salvage yards. Make the next remodeling project as green as possible. It will be an outing and an education. The U.S. Green Building Council is an excellent resource for information about green building issues.
If planning an indoor remodel, consider green materials which might be not only earth-friendly, and can be completely different from the cookie-cutter box store materials that uses. Natural materials which might be gaining popularity with eco-conscious remodelers are bamboo, cork and reclaimed wood.
Bamboo can be used for flooring, paneling and molding, to name but three options. The downside of bamboo, as green and sustainable as it is, is that it usually must be transported great distances. Cork is utilized for flooring and may be made almost exclusively from post-industrialized waste.
Reclaimed wood is promising also. Raiding old buildings (with permission) for doors, paneling and flooring is often a cost-effective and completely green way to recycle the previous into new. You can even repurpose items like classic style doors from barn conversions to develop a dinning table, or to make into some wall paneling -- an incredibly unique wainscoting design.
Concrete is frequently used for outdoor projects like patios, walkways as well as for other pavement projects. While concrete is often a durable material, its production is energy-intensive as well as production involves high emission degrees of pollutants -- one tonne of cement produced means 2 tonnes of CO
2 released in to the atmosphere. Concrete also inhibits ground use of water. This makes concrete less environmentally-friendly than additional options. If you are set around the use of concrete though, make sure you aren't prone to get rid of it any time soon. If you maintain it for years to come that could end up like a better long-term solution. There are also a lot more green variations of concrete you can consider.
Walkways and patios could be paved with permeable concrete pavers. These solid pavers are installed over sand or cut stone. Water drains between your slabs, thereby adding to groundwater resources. Water that goes in the ground beneath permeable concrete pavers promotes cooler pavement.
Pervious concrete, made from stones and cement, allows drainage as well and is EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) recommended. Permeable concrete pavers and pervious concrete are simply two samples of green solutions to improve an outdoor area. Explore the possibilities.
Find what suits specific needs and share the information hardwood Peabody MA with neighbors along with the greater community. House-by-house, yard-by-yard, green remodeling makes a difference inside the new world of global java prices and other environmental challenges.
Green remodeling has extraordinary benefits. Environmentally, it reduces solid waste and promotes healthy air and water quality. Economically, using natural building materials reduces building costs and takes pressure from expensive fossil fuel consumption. In some cases, there are federal and local tax benefits of making green improvements. At the community level, remodeling the green way promotes a normal and eco-conscious standard of life and provides proof of the viability of green building projects.
US Green Building Council,
Concrete production,
Mother Earth News,
Image credits:
Salvaged barn wood - coffeehaus/photobucket
Cork floor - laxsupermom/photobucket
Patio - Kelly8743/photobucket