Green Interior Design - some thoughtful changes

If you've found this page it's most likely due to your interest in green interior design and by green I don't mean green paint and a pretty ugly couch. I mean 

some ideas on how to design your home or apartment in a manner that combines the best of green living, living with an eye out for the environment.

Green Interior design does not mean having to skimp on creativity, nor does it mean populating your space with items that belong in a wacky art studio. We 

have found many terrific products that are not only functional, well priced, look great but also follow our definition of green design.

The kitchen is a great place to make some movement towards green. Starting with the flooring. As with most suggestions in this article we're not talking about throwing out all your gear and starting over but to give you some things to consider when upgrading or replacing older equipment. Flooring is a great example. We're not suggesting that you head straight to your kitchen and dig rip out that stained linoleum flooring right now. But when you feel it's time for an upgrade then consider these options. Flooring is a great place to get the ball rolling with your new green interior design initiative. It's not nearly as difficult or as pricey as you may thnk to upgrade a relatively small floor area. There are some newer products made of natural, sustainable products. Two that you should strongly consider are bamboo and cork floors. I'm going to suggest bamboo. As far as sustainable wood products go, bamboom is king. It grows to maturity in five to seven years unlike the fifty plus years for traditional hardwood. It is also a very dense wood with it's hardness rivaling oak.

The kitchen is also where a ton of plastic can be saved. There are still many people that consume vast amounts of bottled water. The clean water part is great, the bottle part - not so great. A simple to install Brita or Pur on tap water filter will save a household from wasting hundreds of plastic water bottles. It's a cheap and key component of our green interior design plan.

We'll try and finish off each room with a cool gadget. For the kitchen it is the log maker. There are a lot of household waste products (garbage) that can be safely burned in the home, presuming you have a fireplace or wood stove. Items like tea bags, fruit pits, newspapers etc can be formed into a log and burned. Here's a little video showing how it works.

For our design element: When you get around to updating your bathroom please consider reclaimed glass (see image). There are a few companies that take glass from old building windows and even windshields. These glass tiles can look great everywhere from the shower floor to the vanity's backsplash.

The bathroom can play a significant role in our green interior design agenda. With a lot of water usage 9about seventy percent of household water usage) and cleaning there are two fronts we can attack and both are relatively simple. Water usage plays a huge role in anyeco friendly home. Your plan can include projects as easy as replacing the shower head with a water-saving shower head. These typically reduce the flow by mixing the water with air so that you don't really notice the reduction in volume. They feel great too. A tip to go along with that is to simply time your showers. Find an appropriate length and on most days try to keep to the allotted time. Shaving a minute off your showing will save both water and energy in the form of heating the water. The second item, cleaning, is about the easiest thing to change up. This can be done immediately by taking a stroll in your local hardware store. They now stock a ton of Green products that can replace some of the harsher chemicals that you've been using. If you're really creative then you can google home made cleaners. A fun project that can save a couple dollars and be nicer to mother nature. 

In the kitchen our green interior design plan focused on the flooring for our larger expendature. In the living room we'll talk about furniture. It's one of the bigger ticket items in your house and like the kitchen floor, one that you wont be swapping out every year or two. When you do decide to upgrade the sofa of coffee table there are a bunch of eco friendly options to consider. If your theme has an asian accent then lookup a company called greentea. They make stunning living room furniture from wood that has been reclaimed from korean farmhouses. There are tons of these eco companies around. Just do a little research. Rugs for example; you can by a polyester (plastic) rug that oozes out nasty fumes all day or you can consider buying a rug made from jute. Jute is completely renewable and recyclable. We mantion bamboo earlier, you can buy bamboo carpets as well.

Like the kitchen - we have a very simple item on our list of eco friendly things to buy or do. In the living room you aften find a pile of electronics. TV, vcr, pvr, sound system, computer and on and on. These can all draw standby power (power used when the machines are off). Five to ten percent of all the power used in a home is standby power. Our green interior design plan will include one simple gadget in the living room. A power bar. With a simple flip of one swith you can power down all of your entertainment devices. Easy Peasy. Our last item is light. Philips has just announced that they are making an LED replacement bulb for your standard light bulbs. While regular 60 watt lightbulbs run about 1000 hours, the new LED light should run 25000 hours giving you a savings of over a hundred dollars per light.

We'll finish up with a quick tour around the garage. The garage is a great place to lay and experiment with some different and fun eco friendly ideas. One that the kids will get a kick out of is setting up your own solar power. It doesn't have to be a massive undertaking either. You can get a single panel, install it outside (we understand interior solar panels aren't on the market yet) and setup a usage terminal in the garage. You can create a little power station that can be used for rechargable batteries.

One of the rough spots in the garage is chemicals. You'll find a lot of nasty business in a typical garage. One tip for helping organize this is to create a space for storing used chemicals that will be brought to a local drop off center. Most towns offer this service free of charge. You can have a nice box setup, maybe an unused recyclyng box, and once it is full of your old paint cans, solvants, batteries etc. you and the kids can bring it over to the center. It's a great way to teach the kids on the importance of stewardship of our planet and especially how chemicals can get into our water supply if not properly handled.

That's it for our mini green interior design idea. There are tons more, some big projects and many small improvements. I'm sure you even thought of a few while readin this. Remember - searching for great eco-home ideas is pretty easy and you'll almost always stumble across easy to implement green design ideas that you can start tomorrow. Thanks for reading.