Our home has been selected by the Dallas Chapter of the American Institute of Architecture to be one of eight homes on the 2009 Dallas Tour of Homes.  The event is a great way to see some of Dallas’ newest and most amazing architecture.  We’re in great company – check out all of the homes that are on the Tour here (click on “Homes” at the top of the page). 

Accolades go to our architect/design team of Kelly Mitchell and Garry Walling.  This is Kelly’s second home on the Tour (she also contributed to a third home that was on the tour a couple of years ago).  Check out Kelly’s first one here.

If you take part in the Tour, you can actually see our house first-hand!  Buy a ticket!

PS:  I never mentioned that the tour is November 7th and 8th!

Not sure how I missed this, but here’s a great summary of our project (and the website and this blog).  Thanks to the folks at The Surface Blog!

http://www.surface-blog.com/2009/07/being-green-is-gettin-easier-everyday/#more-1008

Today we hosted about 25 folks from the Emerging Green Builders group.  The EGB is an adjunct to the USGBC made up of:

“students and young professionals dedicated to becoming and recruiting the future leaders of the green building movement.”

You can read more about Emerging Green Builders here.

The yard was a little unkempt due to 7 inches of rain in 12 hours just a day and a half ago, but inside was fine.  The hot topic was our bathroom floor tile.  It is fantastic-looking, and people really notice.  But it’s not some exotic tile.  In fact it’s a Dal-Tile product, produced locally.  It’s called Fabrique..everyone loves it!

In the photo, that’s Kelly Mitchell, our architect.  She’s on the right, explaining our house’s green features to a couple of the folks on tour.

We’ve posted many new photos of our house on our website.  Go here and click on the Gallery link.

      We often have folks assuming that for them to become more Green, they need to make huge changes or build a whole house like we did to positively impact the Environment.  This link from Dwell suggests changes in your living space zone-by-zone that can be impactful to the Environment.  Take a few minutes to look through it and implement a change or two!

PS:  the tone of the article is very funny…it’s enjoyable to read through!  Two thumbs up!

Here’s a great website that was forwarded to me by my architect.  She knows that we are trying to find a good home for our 50+ year old hardwood floors that we removed from the original house (pictured above how the exist now in our rental garage).  We used roughly 700 sq ft of them in the studio (and they look fantastic), but we have about 300 sq ft remaining to dispose of.  I posted them on planetreuse.com.  I’ll let you know if they are picked up!

 A lot of articles tell you to change yourlight bulbs, to start recycling, and to avoid littering.  However this post by Leslie Berliant on sustainablog.com correlates individual action to specific data on what is polluting and depleting our planet.  Look through the list of actions and consider doing (or not doing) them.

It’s not that hard to make small changes…and it’s very satisfying to make big ones!

This is a post about a simple and small green feature of the house, but I believe it’s an important one.  I hear a lot these days about how plugged in items like cell phones drain electricity even when they’re fully charged.  Even having the cord and transformer plugged in drains electricity.   Link here.

We specifically designed a shelf in the master bedroom that has multiple switched electrical outlets.  This allows us the convenience of having a place to go for all of our small electrial ‘stuff’ and not having to plug and unplug, or even to search for the chargers.  The items this “charging center” will accommodate are:

• iPhones
• home cordless phones
• iPods
• razors
• toothbrushes
• Blackberries
• other necessities yet to be created by Apple

Robert is an artist working mostly with oils and acrylics, but venturing out into other media as well.  The 700 square foot studio pictured here was a necessity for the new house to avoid Robert having to rent a studio space across town (which he’s done for the last 6 years).   There are a couple of innovative features to the studio, but our favorite is the moveable wall.  In the photo you can see a track hanging from the ceiling that holds a 8′X8′ “pocket wall”.  Think of a pocket door, but really big.  It allows Robert to expand his verticle work surface when needed, add extra gallery wall space when needed, or close off this office area when needed.  The mechanism and design are simple, but the functional benefits are huge!

The pocket wall has no specific green feature – other than maybe to allow in more natural light when the wall is not needed and put into it’s wall pocket.  However, the studio does have many of the same Green features the house does:

• Triple paned glass windows on the west-facing wall
• Exhaust fan to ensure indoor air quality
• Dual flush toilet
• Floors are the recycled oak floors from the house we deconstructed
• Daikin HVAC system

Robert’s website is here, but is awaiting some updates that should happen soon.

My good friend, Jimmy Belasco, has just introduced an eco-friendly candle line that was a Finalist in the NYIGF (New York International Gift Fair) Best New Product category.  While his main line of candles is hardly eco-unfriendly, he has really raised the bar when it comes to ingredients and packaging.

The new candles are 100% natural oils and soy wax, containing zero chemical fragrances.  They are poured into recycleable glass.  The lid is recycleable plastic (number 5, Polypropylene).  They are minimally packaged in recycleable cardboard.

I questioned Jimmy about the lid because the traditional lid he used was a metal composite material of questionable recycleability.  This plastic lid is the same type of plastic that is used in yogurt cups and can be recycled into things like automobile battery cases, signal lights, battery cables, brooms, brushes, and ice scrapers according to IDES.

The empty 6 oz. jars can be recycled in the home into a variety of uses from storage jars to piggy banks!

Also, recently Jimmy went through an environmentally friendly revamp of this distribution network.  He moved distribution to the same facility that pours the candles (previously he had the candles shipped many hundreds of miles to then be further shipped to retail stores).

By the way, the candles  have such a pure and high-quality fragrance that they can freshen a room without being burned – just remove the lid and enjoy!