Eco-Friendly Haven

When customizing your own living space, there’s something far more important than visuals and the overall appearance. Your home needs to be the embodiment of your ideas and principles, which is especially true when it comes to the issue of planet-friendliness and eco-awareness. In this way, you’re making a statement while remodeling your living space, which is a clear win-win scenario. Here are five simple ways to turn your home into an eco-friendly haven.

1. Locally-sourced materials

What makes a material eco-friendly? In some cases, we’re talking about the way in which the material is obtained from nature. In this regard, reclaimed wood is always greener than that produced by deforestation. In other cases, the industrial production of a certain material may cause a no small amount of pollution, which means that by buying them, you’re becoming a part of the problem. Sometimes, however, you also need to take the environmental impact of transportation into consideration. This is why it’s incredibly eco-friendly to rely on locally-sourced materials as much as you can.

2. Insulation and windows

Keeping your home warm during the winter is one of the most energy-consuming tasks that your home will undergo. So, your primary objective here needs to become – preparing your home so that it may be warmed up more with fewer resources. By insulating your walls, replacing your windows with double glazing ones and even doing some work on your attic, you can effortlessly (although not frugally) improve this aspect of your home ownership for good.

3. High-end patio design

This last part mostly reflected on the way in which you can keep your home warm during the colder part of the year, which is why we must now address the issue of keeping your place cool during the summer. Every additional person in your living room additionally warms it up, which is why you might want to look forward to spending more time outdoors (even greeting guests there). This is why renowned housing industry veterans behind Millbrook Homes focus on the exterior as much as they do on the interior. They do this with one goal in mind – making a single homogeneous housing unit you can be proud of.

4. LED lighting system

LED bulbs use four to six times less energy to produce the same amount of light. Due to their nature, they don’t produce as much warmth as their incandescent counterparts. This is also an indirect plus when it comes to the issue we’ve discussed in the previous section. When constructing a new home, you can start by insisting on LED fixtures, while in a pre-owned home, you can take a more frugal approach and replace them one at a time.

5. Self-sustainable energy source

Finally, solar panels are getting more and more common in households around the world, which is why you, as well, might want to start thinking about switching to a self-sustainable energy source. Depending on local grants, your solar panels may pay off in as little as 7 years. On the other hand, by installing miniature panels to keep just one of your appliances running at a time, you might see a positive ROI even sooner. Either way, this is not an investment worth considering merely to improve your home’s resale value.

Conclusion

The thing about household design is that it doesn’t really restrict you when it comes to the eco friendliness of your home. Sure, a table made of reclaimed wood may cost a bit more than the one purchased at the salon, yet, there’s nothing preventing you from opting for a bit more minimulistic approach. The most important thing is that you decide where your priorities lie and start working towards accomplishing these goals.

Article written by, Amelia Atkins: author at Smooth Decorator and a fresh architecture student. The love for architecture and design runs in her family and she knew what she wanted to do from a very young age. You can often find her with a notepad in hand, just looking at the clouds, dreaming about the next skyscraper.