Remodel Green: Make Your House Serve Your Life by Kelly Hart (a Green Home Building Book)

There are many reasons for remodeling. It could be the desire for greater comfort in your home from improved insulation or heating and cooling options. Or perhaps you want to create new space for activities or family members. Or maybe you hope to achieve increased efficiency and savings on utility bills. Sometimes toxic materials can be replaced with more benign, natural choices. Perhaps you want your house to be more attractive.

All of these goals can be accomplished with a carefully planned green remodel. To renovate a home is one of the ultimate ways of recycling, taking an existing structure and using it as a basis for creating just what you need. This is certainly a more sustainable choice than building an entirely new home that would likely entail the use of much more material with all of its embodied energy and negative ecological impact.

Over the course of the author's life he has engaged in numerous remodeling projects, as a professional carpenter, as a homeowner, and as a renter. He draws on this experience as he explores with you what he considers to be the main principles that should guide you in your choices for your own green remodeling project.

The chapters include fitting your house to your needs, the basics of passive solar design, tips on keeping your house cool, options to power your house with renewable energy, ways to conserve water, employing local, natural and recycled materials, the value of cultivating vegetables, how to naturally store the produce that you grow, and why to consider sharing some facilities with others for economy and sustainability.

Kelly Hart is a pioneering earthbag builder, author, filmmaker and webmaster. The building of his multi-dome earthbag Colorado residence is chronicled in the video Building with Bags: How We Made Our Experimental Earthbag / Papercrete House. Kelly also founded and hosts the widely visited natural and green building websites www.greenhomebuilding.com, devoted to all aspects of sustainable architecture and natural building, www.dreamgreenhomes.com, which features a wide range of ecological home plans for sale by various architects and designers, and www.earthbagbuilding.com which explores in depth the many possibilities for building with earthbags.