Green Remodeling: Using Natural Building Materials in Your Remodeling Projects

Remodeling can be an inside or perhaps an outside job. Whether one wants to make changes to the interior of the home, or beautify a walkway or patio, green remodeling is the most economic and eco-friendly strategy to use. Natural building materials might be anything from salvaged barn wood to pervious concrete.
The best advice to have an eco-friendly remodeling project is usually to select natural materials which can be locally available. Building materials can come from all over the world to make it for the local diy box store. That means extreme fossil fuel usage, associated pollution, insufficient regard for local businesses, and sometimes abusive labor practices. Using a beautiful dark wood like wenge to develop a countertop might sound appealing, but simply because this wood could only be found in West Africa, we have been talking a lot of air miles. Finding building materials locally, eradicates those socially unconscious characteristics.
Visit locally-owned hardware stores, find woods that have been harvested from the inside the region, or visit salvage yards. Make the next remodeling project as green as you can. It will be an adventure and an education. The U.S. Green Building Council is an excellent resource for information about green building issues.
If planning an internal remodel, consider green materials which might be not only earth-friendly, and often will be distinctive from the cookie-cutter box store materials that everyone uses. Natural materials which can be gaining popularity with eco-conscious remodelers are bamboo, cork and reclaimed wood.
Bamboo might be used for flooring, paneling and molding, to call but three options. The downside of bamboo, as green and sustainable as it's, is that it usually must be transported great distances. Cork is used for flooring and might be made almost exclusively from post-industrialized waste.
Reclaimed wood is promising too. Raiding old buildings (with permission) for doors, paneling and flooring is a cost-effective and completely green approach to recycle the old into new. You can even repurpose items for example classic style doors from barn conversions to develop a table, or to make into some wall paneling -- an extremely unique wainscoting kitchen design Peabody MA.
Concrete is frequently used for outdoor projects like patios, walkways as well as other pavement projects. While concrete can be a durable material, its production is energy-intensive and its particular production involves high emission degrees of pollutants -- one tonne of cement produced means 2 tonnes of CO
2 released to the atmosphere. Concrete also inhibits ground access to water. This makes concrete less environmentally-friendly than additional options. If you are set for the use of concrete though, ensure you aren't planning to get rid of it in the near future. If you maintain it for years to come this could end up as being a better long term solution. There are also more green variations of concrete you can look at.
Walkways and patios may be paved with permeable concrete pavers. These solid pavers are installed over sand or cut stone. Water drains between your slabs, thereby preparing groundwater resources. Water that goes in to the ground beneath permeable concrete pavers promotes cooler pavement.
Pervious concrete, made from stones and cement, allows drainage too and is EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) recommended. Permeable concrete pavers and pervious concrete are merely two samples of green methods to improve a backyard area. Explore the number of choices.
Find what suits specific needs and share the information with neighbors and also the greater community. House-by-house, yard-by-yard, green remodeling makes a difference inside the new world of global climate change 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 away from expensive fossil fuel consumption. In some cases, there are federal and local tax good things about making green improvements. At the community level, remodeling the green way promotes a wholesome and eco-conscious standard of life and supplies 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