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What is a Green Home?

The vast majority of today’s green homes are visually indistinguishable from conventional homes. The difference is in the details. Green homes feature healthier indoor air quality, optimize energy and water efficiency, help promote a cleaner environment, and reduce our ecological footprint. Today, green homes include new construction, remodels, or even traditional homes. The vast majority of green homes are traditional stick-built homes, however, options also exist for natural building such as strawbale, rammed earth, super adobe, bamboo, insulated concrete forms, clay/straw wall systems, and structural insulated panel systems. However, some of these building styles are more prevalent in other geographic regions.

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Trends in Quality, Sustainable Housing

How do you define home? For Ma & Pa Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie, home was four walls and a roof that protected them from the elements. However, today’s home is much more than that – it is a sanctuary, a place to build community, to work, to play, as well as a place to express who we are and the values by which we live. It is this last attribute that seems to be at the epicenter of today’s homebuyers shopping list. We are not talking about gingerbread window trims or turret shaped entries but rather how energy/water-efficient a home is as well as how easy it is to maintain – in an essence, how our homes impact the environment as well as our wallets and what that says about us as consumers.

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Home Is Where the Health Is

Beneath the veneer of many newly crafted homes and crusty old dwellings, hidden dangers often lurk, undetected, in the folds of our daily lives, including icky biological stuff such as mold and dust mites and scary chemicals like invisible radon gas, volatile organic compounds, and formaldehyde. Homeowners Bryan and Tricia Smith uncovered such villains after a remodeling project in their former Yakima, Wash., home. It prompted a voyage of discovery into the world of materials, systems, and diet -- and the creation of a new home built “green” from the ground up.

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