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Easy Tips for Eco-Friendly Interior Design

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Over the past years, interior design has become an important aspect of putting together the entire appeal of the house. Additionally, it has become an important method of self-expression. The design of the home as well as the furniture and accessories chosen by the homeowner can tell other people a lot about his/her personality and style. Naturally, homeowners want to ensure that their homes reflect their own taste as well as their values.

Interior designing is not merely about improving the aesthetic appeal of a room but it also includes proper usage and selection of furniture, accessories, and materials used to ensure that they are healthy for the residents. For this reason, a lot of homeowners are now aiming for an eco-friendly interior design. If you are thinking of going green, you will be able to achieve a stylish atmosphere in your home, and you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to get the design you want.

Eco-Friendly Interior Design Ideas

Today, more and more people are turning towards sustainable and environmentally friendly products and design. For this reason, the interior design field is supporting wonderful measures to achieve eco-friendly design in homes using sustainable resources. Here are some easy tips to help you obtain a green, healthy, and safe living space.

Re-Use And Recycle

If you want to achieve an eco-friendly interior design, you have to be creative and think outside the box. You have to think about recycling, reducing, and re-using the things you already have. Whether you want to slightly redecorate a room, or remodel the entire house, you must first think about the items that you can put back into the space. Are there any items which you can re-use?

For instance, if you have an armoire that still looks good and can still serve its purpose, there is no need to rip it apart. You can consider refurnishing them by coating it with new paint that will compliment your new interior design theme. Reusing items mean that you have to be creative because you usually need to re-purpose the items for other uses.

Use Natural Light If Possible

Another tip to achieve an environmentally friendly design is to let as much sunlight in as possible, and to maximize daylight. To do so, you can consider using skylights or open shades. You can also design your house so that the windows are facing south as this will allow enough sunlight to get inside your house. In doing so, you will not only save on electrical bills, but you are also preventing pollutants from being emitted inside your house. Additionally, you can also change the light bulbs used in your house, and use compact florescent lights (CFLs) or LED lights instead, since this alternative lighting can help you save on energy costs in the long run. When you look for proper lighting, you have to consider the label and choose those with energy efficient rating.

Non-Toxic Paints

There are some paints that have harmful chemicals known as Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC). These compounds release toxic chemicals into the air in your home which will negatively affect your air quality. Additionally, these compounds are harmful for your health and for all the people living in your home. For this reason, you have to choose paint with low-VOC or no-VOC, especially when you are painting a child’s room. You must also avoid using wallpaper since the adhesive used to attach them can contain VOCs as well.

Eco-Friendly Flooring

Natural, sustainable, and eco-friendly flooring can make a huge difference in a green home. Most standard flooring options are far from eco-friendly and sustainable, and they also contain harmful chemicals. If you want to have stylish but safe flooring, you can consider using bamboo flooring as a long-lasting option. Bamboo contains a higher fiber rating than most tropical hardwoods, and they feel great under one’s foot. Additionally, it can be recycled once it has reached the end of its life. You can also use eco floor tiles for your kitchen and bathroom. Not only are these tiles sustainable, but they have the additional advantage of providing thermal insulation.

Featured images:
  •  License: Creative Commons – Jeremy Levine Design.”Living Room”. April 29, 2009. Online Image. Flickr. Dec 15, 2012 image source

Kris Lim is an environmentalist who wants to promote green living by encouraging people to use eco-friendly, sustainable, and safe materials. For this reason, she offers tips and advice on how to achieve an environmentally friendly interior design in your home. She also regularly contributes to interior design websites, such as susan-hopkins.com.

How To Create Plans For Your Interior Design

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Interior design is no doubt more an art than a science, but this isn’t to say that you can’t improve your ability by applying a systematic approach and that it doesn’t require some modicum of planning and measuring. For instance it can really help a great deal to create a plan for your rooms before you go about creating them as this way you will be able to better decide in advance what you need, and you will be able to visualize what is going to look good ahead of time to avoid making mistakes. Here we will look at some tips to help you come up with your room designs so that your rooms turn out as well as possible.

What do You Have?

First of all you need to know what you’re working with. Here there are various approaches you can use. For instance you may already have everything you want to include in the room and you may simply be coming up with a good way of organizing those items. Alternatively however you might be open to replacing some items or getting some entirely new ones, and this way you can use your design to find out what other things you might need. Lastly you might want to use this to just draw up your ideal home, and then that way you can go on to find the things that match your vision.

Sketchup

Now you know what you’re working with it’s a good idea to just come up with some ideas. Before you actually draw anything concrete or professional down then, just try sketching some concepts onto the back of a napkin. Draw your room the way you’d ideally like it with the items you are using and keep it vaguely realistic without worrying too much about specific measurements. Come up with an idea you’re happy with and then you can work towards something along those lines.

Measurements

painter's house, isfahan, iran october 2007

Now you are going to want to draw your actual floor plan. Of course if you’re redecorating your room on your own you might choose to skip this stage and instead just try moving things into place to see if they’ll fit, but if you’re working with a designer or contractor or you want to save yourself time, then you will want to come up with something accurate. In this case then use a tape measure to measure the size of your room, and then the dimensions of the individual pieces of furniture. Now sticking to those measurements try drawing the elements where you want them using a ruler to see if they’ll fit.

Software

work01

If you want to make this even more accurate and be able to manipulate the items more easily without using a rubber then you can always try using software such as 3D modelling software to create your floor plan. There are many different types of 3D modelling software you can use to this end such as Rhino 3D or Blender, and these will allow you to draw your elements onto a grid with measurements and then view them from 360 degrees or even create your furniture in 3D if you want to go that far so that you can try moving it around and seeing pretty much what it will look like for real.

Lewis Stew regularly writes blogs related to home improvement ideas. For reading his blogs you can visit the website of Location Lanzarote.

Do you ever go to open houses just to look around?

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This past weekend my husband and I decided to go to a few open houses being held at some homes that are up for sale in our neighborhood.

We aren’t thinking of selling our home or moving – not just yet anyway … but we were curious as to how the home owners had renovated and decorated their homes.

One open house we visited was in a home that’s very similar to ours in design. Like us – they had knocked down the walls in the entry hallway, and the walls separating the living room, dinning room and main hallway in order to create an open living room dining room area. The only big difference was that they hadn’t taken out hte stairway hallway as we did. We felt that our main floor looked a little bigger or more open than the home we were in.

Another house that we visited was totally modern – stark white walls, white furnishings and just about everything stainless steel in the kitchen – including the Hansgrohe faucet. The house was a little too modern for my tastes, but I enjoyed looking around.

My husband and I are still renovating our home. Actually our renovations are stalled … so visiting a few open houses might have helped motivate us to finish our renovations and gave me some ideas for how we might decorate once we’re finally done our renovations … well if we ever manage to finish!

Do you ever go to open houses to just look around and get ideas?

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