A Green home should be energy efficient, healthy and use sustainable resources. Green homes take advantage of nature's processes in order to use less energy, consume less water and produce less waste. Insulations, orientation towards light, air circulation, energy efficient appliances and lighting are all considered.
Green homes are built from recycled materials or lumber harvested with sustainable logging practices. They can also be built using such creative materials as old tires, mud, hemp and just plain dirt. In all cases, these materials needn't make the home look as if you are caveperson living in a lump of earth, nor are they unlivable or so "unique" that they frighten guests. In fact, most Green homes do not look very different from your average home - unless, of course, you want it to. See the previous Green Homes article for great websites about Green homes.
Building a Green home, as mentioned in my last article, is probably the least expensive way for the average consumer to go. But for those who have the cash to spend, renovating an old building to be Green will probably have the least environmental impact. But anything is better than the giant, toxic, cookie-cutter suburbs metastasizing across North America.
What's so bad about those cookie-cutter homes? Let's start with the size and frame. The average home of the 1950's housed a family of 4-5 and was the size of today's average 3-car garage - anywhere from 900 to 1000 square feet. Today's standard home houses a smaller family of 3-4 and is about 3500 square feet. For some reason we feel we need more stuff and more space to stash the stuff. But all that space adds up and takes a major toll on the environment. For one thing, you are now heating and cooling twice as much home and most of us don't just heat the rooms we are in - we heat the whole darned house.
