While you may think some of your stuff has hit the end its life cyle, or is only good for one thing, much of it could be leading a double life in your garden! Before you give them the heave-ho, check out Real Simple’s great list of 46 new uses for old things in the garden; here are our 10 favorite ideas. More Read More..
The trend toward keeping backyard livestock in urban and suburban areas seems only to be growing. We’ve featured plenty of chicken coop designs in the past, but we loved this homemade coop in a small backyard in Los Angeles so much that we wanted to share the story.
Irwin Miller, whose kids’ room we featured for its clever use of small space, inherited some chickens from his son’s school. He explains how the whole addition
Either he knows a lot about gardening, or he’s a whiz at Photoshop. I’m betting on the first.
Lee has a four-part system for beating the weeds:
– Don’t disturb the soil. (prevents buried weed seeds from surfacing and germinating.)
– Set up permanent beds and paths. (so you won’t have to till to aerate the soil.)
– Keep the soil ….
As the housing market entered its steep decline during the latter part of the past decade, it took home sizes with it. While there was much to bemoan about the state of the industry, among designers and architects it seemed the one bright spot was what appeared to be the demise of the McMansion and an increased focus on efficient functionality. Between 2007 and 2010, the average size of a new, single-family home in the U.S. fell from 2,504 square feet to 2,381 square feet, according to U.S. Census data. It was the rise of smaller and smarter.
Or was it?
“For all these years, the trend was going [down], and then in 2011 it got reversed,” says Rose Quint, assistant vice president of survey research at the National Association of Home Builders
A new Facebook app will enable consumers to quickly and easily benchmark their home’s energy usage against similar homes, compare energy use with friends, and share tips on how to become more energy efficient.
The social energy app is an initiative of Facebook, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), software provider Opower, and 16 utility companies. More than 20 million households within the 16 participating utilities’ territories will be able to take advantage of the app’s “Utility Connect” feature, allowing customers to choose to have their energy use automatically update each ….
Many of us recycle and reuse, but there’s something vaguely intimidating about making the move to composting. I’ll admit that I was guilty of hesitation, worrying about the smelliness of the endeavor and never entirely sure of what can and can’t be composted in the first place. But after a bit of investigation and minimal effort, I’ve realized that composting is really easy, affordable, useful, and sustainable.
Garden pests are one of the few things I find frustrating about gardening. Whether it’s the snails taking over your lettuce or the aphids sucking on your roses – it’s definitely annoying – but not a reason to fret and reach for harmful, toxic sprays. They might eliminate the pesky culprits, but they are harmful to you and the environment
Green building might be little more than a fringe hippie idea if not for certification. The medals and honors now available through rating systems have enabled a good and altruistic effort to become a highly marketable quality. LEED – Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – is now the most well-known and well-used certification system, claiming nearly 9 billion square feet of space participating in its various certification programs globally. But it’s not alone, and it’s not necessarily the greenest of the green. The relatively new Living Building Challenge has been steadily gathering fans in the green building community for tougher-than-LEED standards such as net-zero energy and net-zero water.
Passive House Training is coming to Atlanta in June & July. Click here to see more information on the up coming classes.
Big Ass Fan recently debuted the Haiku, a ceiling fan they deem as the quietest and most energy efficient fan in the world .
There’s nothing quite like gathering around a crackling fire out of doors, and it’s easily argued that modern homo sapiens spends far too little time around this primal element. This simple, cozy but elegant fireplace dome by Norwegian firmHaugen/Zohar Arkitekter — built for children in a residential neighborhood — is one place that will get people quickly re-acquainted with a timeless and universal tradition.
We’ve all faced it at one time or another. You walk into the laundry room, fully weighted down with a bulging basket of dirty clothes, only to discover that every machine is being used … and there’s a queue of other baskets stacked up next to it. Skip the laundry room, head back to the comfort of your apartment and freshen your clothes with these portable washers and drying racks.
How to Slash Domestic Gas Consumption by a Factor of Five OilPrice.com Below is a plot of temperature within our house over the course of 8 days in late December, 2011. Except for the “experiment” on Christmas (day 359–360), the house went along its usual, passive undulation. The average inside (blue) temperature ..
With the construction industry still recovering in the U.S., companies offering “green” services may be able to set themselves apart and grow business faster, according to a survey conducted by McGraw Hill Construction.
In 2011, green builds in the residential sector made up 17 percent of construction, totaling $17 billion in economic activity. And the value of the residential green building market is expected to grow fivefold by 2016, taking up to 38 percent of the market and representing $87 billion to $114 billion.
McGraw Hill defines a green building as “one built to LEED standards, an equivalent green building certification program, or one that incorporates numerous green building elements across five category areas: energy efficiency, water efficiency, resource efficiency, responsible site management and improved indoor air quality.”
Nest Labs. The Nest Learning Thermostat monitors homeowner behaviors and preferences to create a customized heating and cooling schedule. It learns residents’ personal schedules in a week and automatically adjusts heating or cooling when the home is vacant to save energy. An Energy History function shows how much energy has been saved. In addition, users can change the temperature, adjust their schedule, and check energy usage via laptop or
Everybody is mad about Nikola Tesla these days, claiming that he was a greater inventor than Edison. They even name cars after him. Certainly, Tesla was a genius; he and Westinghouse won the first round of the Current wars, and most of the world has been using alternating current for the last century. But Thomas Alva Edison had something to celebrate on his 165th birthday this weekend; He lost that first battle, but has won the war. It’s like William Gibson said; The future is here, it’s just not very evenly distributed. Five years ago, when I first said Edison was right, I got pounded in the comments, but now the evidence is incontrovertible, and even that car with Tesla’s name on it runs on DC.
Unique Habitat For Humanity Home Boasts Ultra-Energy Savings WPTZ The Champlain Valley By Jill Glavan CHARLOTTE, Vt. — The final of three homes built by Green Mountain Habitat for Humanity in Charlotte is completed and leaders say the ultra-energy efficient model is already catching on
“The Greenest Building is the one already standing”, Carl Elefante’s great line, has been the mantra of the green preservation movement, and I have used it a lot on TreeHugger. But while we knew it intuitively, we never had any real data. Until now, with the release of The Greenest building: Quantifying the Environmental Value of Building Reuse, released this morning. The report uses Life Cycle Analysis, (LCA) to compare the relative impacts of building reuse and renovation versus new construction.
Korean artist Jihyun Ryou, a graduate of the Dutch Design Academy Eindhoven, translates traditional knowledge on food storage into contemporary design. She found the inspiration for her wall-mounted storage units while listening to the advice of her grandmother, a former apple grower, and other elderly. Her mission: storing food outside the refrigerator.
