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Home and Renovation shares tips for buying, selling, building, renovating and running an eco-friendly home. |
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Home and Renovation
Why battle against the Earth to force it to produce products that naturally wouldn’t flourish? As a different approach, permaculture mimics natural ecosystems to maximize food production as well as create sustainable human settlements. Extending beyond farming practices, permaculture is a philosophy and set of ethics for how we can beneficially coexist with the environment. 
Deciding to purchase a house is one of the biggest financial and emotional decisions of anyone’s lifetime. As an eco-conscious consumer, in addition to making a sound fiscal choice, you’ll also want your purchase to reflect your environmental convictions. Factors to weigh as you begin your quest include types of green features most important to you, best locations for an eco-home, green home financing and choosing a realtor who knows about the green real-estate market. 
Spend just one evening watching shows on a home-improvement cable channel and you’ll get lots of advice on how to quickly sell your home for top dollar. Such advice includes hiring a realtor knowledgeable about your area, competitive pricing and staging to sell. But what about selling a green home? Here are some things to keep in mind when trying to sell eco-friendly real estate. 
Having a roof over our heads is a basic human need, but shouldn’t come at the expense of the environment, which houses the rest of the creatures on this planet. There are numerous housing designs that can be self-assembled from recycled materials (and be recycled themselves), are portable and small enough to be shipped with a low carbon footprint, and have lower energy requirements than the four-wall and slate-roof model we take for granted. The building materials are all around us; it’s up to us to put them together. 
If you are looking to buy a green home, you likely will run into terms like passive solar, active solar, water catchment, LEED certification, xeriscaping, Earthship, pervious concrete, daylighting, etc. As sustainable architecture continues to grow in popularity, so does the vocabulary associated with it. Whether you’re searching for a new house with eco-friendly features or you’re interested in making some green upgrades to your current home, you may find the options and terminology overwhelming. To clear up some of the confusion, here are definitions of today’s most used environmental home terms and buzzwords: Supporting Sponsors
