The Green Home Blueprint


Book Description

**The Green Home Blueprint** Unlock the secrets to transforming your home into an eco-friendly sanctuary with "The Green Home Blueprint!" This comprehensive guide is your ultimate resource for making sustainable living accessible and practical. Whether you're starting your green journey or looking to enhance your current efforts, this book delivers clear, actionable advice to help you create a healthier, more energy-efficient home. Dive into Chapter 1 and gain an essential understanding of your home's energy footprint. Learn to identify and eradicate common energy-wasting habits and discover the myriad benefits of an energy-efficient household. In Chapter 2, explore effective insulation and air sealing techniques, from DIY projects to professional services, ensuring your home remains cozy and cost-effective year-round. Chapter 3 delves into optimizing your heating and cooling systems with smart thermostats and regular maintenance tips. Uncover renewable energy options in Chapter 4, including solar, wind, and geothermal solutions, to significantly reduce your carbon footprint. Sustainable water usage is made simple in Chapter 5 with water-saving fixtures, rainwater harvesting, and greywater recycling. Illuminate your home with eco-friendly lighting solutions from Chapter 6, and select sustainable building materials in Chapter 7 to ensure every aspect of your living space is green. Chapter 8 guides you through choosing energy-efficient home appliances to maximize efficiency across your kitchen, laundry, and electronics. Reduce waste effectively with strategies from Chapter 9, and improve your indoor air quality with non-toxic paints, air-purifying plants, and better ventilation in Chapter 10. Chapter 11 offers eco-friendly home cleaning tips, while Chapter 12 focuses on sustainable furniture and decor. Enhance your landscape sustainably with Chapter 13’s native plants, organic gardening, and green lawn alternatives. Chapter 14 provides water and energy-efficient landscaping strategies, including drip irrigation and mulching. Get inspired to build an eco-friendly home office, manage energy usage efficiently, and understand the financial aspects of going green with Chapters 15 to 18. Involve the whole family in sustainability efforts with Chapter 19, and stay informed on the latest green technologies and innovations in Chapter 20. "The Green Home Blueprint" is your essential guide to creating an environmentally friendly, cost-saving, and forward-thinking household. Start making impactful changes today and embrace a greener lifestyle for a sustainable tomorrow.




Blueprint for Greening Affordable Housing


Book Description

Blueprint for Green Affordable Housing is a guide for housing developers, advocates, public agency staff, and the financial community that offers specific guidance on incorporating green building strategies into the design, construction, and operation of affordable housing developments. A completely revised and expanded second edition of the groundbreaking 1999 publication, this new book focuses on topics of specific relevance to affordable housing including: how green building adds value to affordable housing the integrated design process best practices in green design for affordable housing green operations and maintenance innovative funding and finance emerging programs, partnerships, and policies Edited by national green affordable housing expert Walker Wells and featuring a foreword by Matt Petersen, president and chief executive officer of Global Green USA, the book presents 12 case studies of model developments and projects, including rental, home ownership, special needs, senior, self-help, and co-housing from around the United States. Each case study describes the unique green features of the development, discusses how they were successfully incorporated, considers the project's financing and savings associated with the green measures, and outlines lessons learned. Blueprint for Green Affordable Housing is the first book of its kind to present information regarding green building that is specifically tailored to the affordable housing development community.




Strawbale Home Plans


Book Description

Strawbale Home Plans is a meditative and conscientious exploration of the innumerable reasons to consider straw bale as a viable building material. Environmentally friendly, super insulative, economical, and natural, straw bale can be used to build everything from garden walls and shed roofs to small homes. The vibrant pages of this practical guide are filled with rich photos of organic, fluid, undulating structures pulsating with subtle creativity. Indeed at once a pragmatic construction manual and a philosophical, artistic guidebook, this handbook provides food for the mind and soul.




Big Book of Small House Designs


Book Description

75 unique designs for attractive, efficient, environmentally friendly homes. Now available in paperback, this collection of 75 plans for small homes offers more than 500 usable blueprints and other illustrations for a variety of living spaces suitable for every environment and style, from a New England farmhouse to a sophisticated townhouse in the city to a Santa Fe ranch. The designs include site drawings, floor plans, elevation drawings, section drawings, perspective drawings, and exploded views. A brief introduction to each home describes its setting, the philosophy behind the design and its intended use, materials used, recommended landscaping, and more. Many of the homes come with money-saving and environmentally sound features such as solar panels and water heaters, wood stoves, ceiling fans, airlock entries, wind power alternatives, and natural gas heaters.




Big Book of Small Home Plans, 2nd Edition


Book Description

· A practical do-it-yourself guide to help you save money and make planning and cost estimating easier when building the small home of your dreams · Features a catalog of more than 360 home plans to select from for building a variety of small homes that are 1,200 square feet or smaller · Includes easy-to-follow construction blueprints both in print and digital formats for each project · Contains a variety of plans for cabins, cottages, small homes, and tiny houses in Craftsman, Country, Contemporary, and Traditional styles · Includes helpful advice on rightsizing your home, and maximizing your living space with organization, decorating, and storage solutions · Updated edition features revisions to plans, as well as 140+ new plans by new designers with new photography




Green Building Through Integrated Design (GreenSource Books)


Book Description

Market: architects; engineers; project managers; general contractors; cost estimators; property and real estate managers; facility managers; property developers International appeal: includes 25 project profiles from the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, China, and India Thirty key players share their experiences and lessons learned from working on green building projects




The Big Book of Small Home Plans


Book Description

Select from a catalog of more than 360 expertly prepared plans for building small homes under 1,200 square feet. Easy-to-follow construction blueprints and materials lists are available for each project to ensure success.




A New Blueprint for a Green Economy


Book Description

Published in 1989, Blueprint for a Green Economy presented, for the first time, practical policy measures for 'greening' modern economies and putting them on a path to sustainable development. This new book, written by two of the Blueprint for a Green Economy authors, revisits and updates its main messages by asking, first, what has been achieved in the past twenty years, and second, what more needs to be done to generate a truly 'green economy' in the twenty-first century? Blueprint for a Green Economy had one over-arching theme. Making economies more sustainable requires urgent progress in three key policy areas: valuing the environment, accounting for the environment and incentives for environmental improvement. Today, with the threat of global warming, the decline in major ecosystems and their services, and fears over energy security, achieving these goals is even more vital. The current book first summarizes the main messages from Blueprint for a Green Economy and explains why, given rapid and widespread global environmental degradation, they are still relevant. The book then examines the progress since Blueprint for a Green Economy in implementing policies and other measures to improve environmental valuation, accounting and incentives. Although much has been accomplished, additional advances are still required to green economies successfully. The book highlights the new policies and approaches needed for economic management of today's environmental concerns. Over twenty years later, A New Blueprint for a Green Economy once again emphasizes practical policies for greening modern economies, and explains why such an economic roadmap to a greener future is essential, if modern economies are to develop successfully and sustainably.




The New Ultimate Book of Home Plans


Book Description

730 home plans in full color; special sections on home design & decorating, plus lots of tips.




The Northwest Green Home Primer


Book Description

The essential, real-world, green home manual Everyone can make green home decisions on a budget with this inspiring, informationpacked guide. Whether you are building, remodeling, buying, or just curious, here are real-world strategies for getting the greenest results from your budget, with hundreds of ideas for a home that is built to last, comfortable and healthy, money- and time-saving in the long term, and kind to the planet. From your home's exterior to its operating systems within, from siting to interior design, this is the basic training that has given many the confidence to proceed. Award-winning sustainable design and building consultant and teacher Kathleen O'Brien and architectural designer and sustainability consultant Kathleen Smith offer their "top picks" for each phase. They've also each faced their own green home challenges in a single-family house and a duplex, and other case studies show affordable energy-efficient green homes both old and new. Brimming with ideas, clear and logical, with tips, checklists, and resources for green home planning, construction, remodeling, and maintenance, extensively illustrated with photos and diagrams, this is the essential green home manual for novice and professional alike.