Got any tips for buying secondhand?...

I know some of you are experienced at shopping secondhand, and I’m hoping you’ll answer a few questions I have. I’d like to get some garden furniture or maybe a kitchen table and chairs, and have been unable to find anything that’s both eco-friendly and in my price range. I figured I’d try to get something secondhand instead. I do ok with op-shopping for clothes, and we got our Prius secondhand...

Keeping your drying rack out of the way...

We all know we should be only using clothes dryers in ‘emergencies’, right? I have a drying rack for when it’s too hot or too wet to use our backyard clothes line. But finding a place to keep it has been a hassle. It takes up a lot of room, and doesn’t really fit in our laundry. Well, not if we want to actually use the laundry sink or get to the toilet. So the rack has ended up in our dining area...

Green cleaning...

So my New Year’s theme this year is “Reduce”. One of the things I’ve been doing to help this along is to declutter my house. I feel like getting rid of stuff, preferably to charity or to be recycled instead of creating landfill, will help me keep focused on my journey to live more simply and sustainably. Yesterday I tackled my laundry. I can’t believe how much junk was in there! Plus cardboard...

What are your eco-friendly skills?...

A while back Planet Green had an article called 99 Skills for an Eco-Friendly DIY Life. It’s a long list of different skills that would make living an environmentally-conscious life a lot easier. I rated pretty well overall, without being a particular expert in any one category. I got 61 out of 99 overall: that’s 13/26 in food (mostly on the easy ones, although I throw a pretty fantastic eco-friendly party),...

Deep walkability: how’s your suburb?...

Walkscore website (I don't actually live right in the CBD) You’ve probably heard of the idea of “walkability“, that is, whether or not a place has decent footpaths and bikepaths that lead to shops and services and interesting places within walking or biking distance. There’s a few websites out there that measure the walkability of the place where you live, like Walkscore (which does the maps...

Bright green homes = small green homes...

Last week I posted about the way our houses will be built in the future, and CanadaGuy brought up a really good point: these days, our houses are much larger than they really need to be. I wrote about it a while ago (“How much room do we really need?”), but for some reason it slipped my mind when talking about bright green homes. Anyway, I thought you’d all like to see a video on this topic. It’s...

Bright green homes...

Red Box house, designed by Jeremy Levine http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremylevinedesign/ There’s a lot of talk about the horrible things that’ll happen if we don’t stop climate change and other types of environmental damage. But I’d like to focus for a while on what could happen if we get it right - what happens if we build a sustainable future for ourselves and our kids? Alex Steffen is one...

Go Green Baby...

Today’s post is by guest-blogger Jo from greenbeings.com.au, a site with lots of great sustainable living info. Here she shares ways to keep your eco-impact low when you’ve got a new little person in the house. I recently had a baby and made the decision to try and minimise the impacts of the new addition to the family. I knew nothing about babies and even less about what they needed, but after a whole three...

Flowerdale: building it back green...

Builditback.org As Australians gear up for another hot, dry summer, some communities are still trying to rebuild what they lost in the bushfires earlier this year. It must be awful to have lost all you own, and have to start again. But it also gives the chance for renewal. One place that’s been leading the way in rebuilding is Flowerdale, a small town in Victoria hard-hit by the firestorm, and then left alone for...

Solar hemi-cycle house...

Last Sunday Dave and I visited one of the open houses that were set up for Sustainable House Day. I’d been to the Painted Fish and Josh Byrne’s garden a few years ago as part of the event, and wanted to see something new. This one was a solar hemi-cycle house, built in a curve facing north. The whole building is only one room wide. It has a bedroom and bathroom on either end of the curve, with a laundry/pantry,...