Unseen Green Home Improvements

Not So Obvious Improvements For Greener Homes

You don’t have to go “all green-all the time” in your quest to live a greener lifestyle. I think we all know not every household has the available budget to start over with a new green home. And quite honestly not everybody has the ready cash for substantial renovations. So where can you start, in order to make a difference?

Push The Envelope (Towards Green)

The envelope of your home is any surface exposed to the elements. Included are the foundation, basement flooring, basement walls, the join of basement and above ground walls, main living space walls, exterior surface treatments, garage walls, garage flooring, windows, doors, interior flooring, interior walls, ceilings, roof, and chimney joints.

If you have not had a home inspection performed in 10 or more years, consider investing in a professional inspection which will highlight all the weak spots in your home’s envelope. You’ll also have the added bonus of discovering any hidden problems which might be undermining the integrity of your home.

Once you have a list of weak spots, and where improvements are required, you can map out an action plan for pragmatic renovating based on potential operating savings realized upon completion of the project. For instance you might discover your basement walls are letting moisture in which is reducing your furnace efficiency and increasing your fuel costs. You might have single pane windows throughout which are also causing a substantial energy loss.

A reputable home inspector can help you determine which symptom is hurting you the most. Based on their calculations, you can decide to invest in fixing your biggest energy drain first. What you’ll have is basically a working action plan and budget which will reduce your lifetime operating costs by improving the efficiency of your home.

Black Is The New Green

Keeping you on budget and in the black is the goal of green improvements. After all, if green renovations put you into long term debt, there’s no incentive to improve the energy efficiency of your home.

We want all our clients to be in the black, and to reduce the lifetime costs of home ownership. It’s important to our city, our communities, and to our great big huggable planet. Green home renovations don’t have to be flashy. They don’t even have to be visible. All they have to do is work.

Have you done an invisible reno lately? Tell us about it, or ask questions. We want to get the ideas flowing back and forth.