Hands at Home

ecorating your home to be environmentally friendly shouldn’t be expensive. And it shouldn’t just be for the environmental activists either; we all have a responsibility to our communities, and to our families. There are many ways you can decorate “green” for a lot less “green”! Here are The Budget Decorator’s top 5 ways to green up your home, on a budget!

• To give a room a taller feeling, place matching tall plants in the corners and add a torchiere light behind a sofa or chairs for extra illumination.
• Buy a brass knocker for your front door. Consider having it monogrammed.
• Bring out your good china, glassware, silver and placemats, place them somewhere where they accessible so that once a month you can use them for dinner when you cook a special meal with a theme
• Turn an ugly old tub into a nicer combination tub-shower or just a glass-enclosed shower.

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• Go room-by-room at night to make sure you have enough illumination, because it gets dark in the winter earlier. You should have a variety of lights for mood as well as reading and working.
• Set aside a place in your home to write letters - not e-mails but the old-fashioned hand-written, send via postal mail type.
• No matter how much you love your home, traveling is always fun, educational and broadening. Keep your favorite travel magazines for future trips, along with pamphlets about places, in a convenient spot for research and planning.
• Place a phone pad and pen or pencil by each phone in the house so all messages are recorded. Consider putting a phone in your living room in a discreet place.

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• Light up a powder room with tiny votive candles around the sink ledge or on a nearby table. Place some potpourri in a small dish or julep cup to keep the room fresh smelling.
• Don't bring an old broom to a new house. Buy a new one to start fresh. After you use it to clean, change the furniture arrangment in your new living room and rearrange the accessories on your coffee tables.
• Decorate a guest bathroom in a lighthouse theme. Replace traditional towel racks with solid brass ship anchors that can be installed on L-brackets, which will then hang away from the wall to serve as towel hooks.

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• Have a dinner party, invite friends who don't know one another and serve wine in new attractive stemware and buy some new colorful dessert dishes that don't match your regular china, but complement it.
• If you never use a dining room, turn your new one into a quasi-library by placing a smaller table that can expand at one end, adding bookshelves, comfortable seating, stereo equipment, a soft patterned rug underfoot and good lighting.
• Put in an underground sprinkler system that will water your grass and flowers better, save you time and labor and ease your back strain.

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aybe you're a pack rat and have a hard time throwing things out. Maybe you're an organization buff who loves finding a place for everything. Or maybe you are just ecologically minded and feel guilty filling landfills with your household possessions. Whatever the case, repurposing old items can be the answer and is becoming increasingly popular for design, storage and organization reasons. Plus, it saves money to boot. "Just about anything in your home can be reused with a little paint or by looking at it a different way," says Kathy Peterson, designer, organization expert and author of Kathy Peterson's Great Outdoor Decorating Makeovers: Easy, Elegant Transformations on a Limited Budget.

Here, Peterson shares some simple repurposing tips. Try these yourself, or use these ideas as a launching point to start thinking creatively about unused objects you have lying around your home. And soon you'll be able to throw out the guilt instead of your stuff.

• Have your curtains cleaned, dust all blinds and baseboards before you place your furniture, and have your windows washed. Your house will sparkle.
• Get ready for Halloween by planning a costume party for different generations of your family and friends. Pick a theme and include old-fashioned games such as bobbing for apples.
• Assign a chore to each family member to make life run more smoothly in coming months. For exmaple, have one child set the table nightly, and another do the dishes. Rotate tasks so everyone gets to learn something new.
• A mah-jongg set with creamy plastic tiles the size of dominoes with pretty symbols adds cachet to a family room. It can create the theme of the room with the proper mah-jongg table, tiles encased in an alligator-embossed box and the mah-jongg pad or cloth.

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• Learn a new sport, even if a spectator; you can buy a book, tapes or take a class to hone your skills.
• Check your property for dead trees and foliage. Take down old greenery, then plant some new items to fill in where it's bare.
• Cover a bulletin board with special photographs and illustrations that typify your lifestyle such as quotes from a magazine or funky cartoons.

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new generation of parents is bringing the family scrapbook into the 21st century with a fresh, decidedly modern twist: The photo blog. These wildly popular online journals allow parents to record and share their everyday lives through images instead of words.

"This is a great way for families and friends to stay in touch and boost their bonds," says Adam Seifer, the co-founder and CEO of Fotolog.com, the world's largest photo blogging community. "Photo blogs have become an intriguing, real-time window into everyday life."

Once you create your own photo blog, friends and family members will no longer cringe when you jam their in-boxes with dozens of photos of your latest birthday party or amusement park excursion. "I used to get about two or three e-mails a week from my sister with tons of .jpeg attachments of pictures of my one-year-old niece," says Jamie Frazier, 36, of St. Louis, Missouri. "The files were always huge and I felt nervous about downloading them at work. But now I can just go to one site and check them all out at my convenience. It's like one-stop shopping!"

• Before you buy new clothing for fall, clean closets and check what you need. You may be surprised by how much you own, especially if you alter or clean items.
• Celebrate one new occasion in September, such as Grandparents' Day.
• Convert a family room into a music room with soundproof walls using wool felt on the walls that are padded to muffle the sound. A handsome complement in the room might be leather floor tiles and a comfy chair in which to listen to your favorite tunes.

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tandard house construction has a problem, and it's wooden.

With the price of wood skyrocketing, and the ecological impact of all that wood, glue, nails, gypsum, Tyvek, fiberglass, paint and primer on the landscape, the cost of a house is quickly becoming more than just the price of the land and a few 2x4s.

The Hand-Sculpted House is the where, when, how and why--written by the "who"--of cob construction, an ancient building style undergoing a big revival. It explains everything, from the right consistency of soil to the best dance-moves to use when mixing up a batch of cob. Yes, I said soil.

I can hear the howls now: "A house made of DIRT?!?!? What, are you nuts?" Nope.

Cob is one of humanity's oldest construction methods. While "rammed earth" compresses dirt into a semi-resilient construction material, cob takes that same base element, dirt--or more specifically, clay--and then adds in sand for aggregate. Then we add structural integrity in the form of straw.

Walls aren't so much built as they are "knitted," or squished into place. Once dry, it is covered in plaster or mastic, and then painted. You have seen these houses before; you just didn't realize that that old English countryside house dated 1544 was actually made out of clay, sand and straw.

• Add elegance to a living room entrance by creating an archway adorned with ornamental plaster moldings. Add columns on either side of the arch to support it in a grand manner.
• To have a place to sit in a child's tiny bedroom, consider stacking stools with vinyl cushions. Also, instead of a bedspread, buy a duvet cover that can double as a sheet.
• When issuing invitations to this year's Thanksgiving feast, ask your guests to write down what they most love about their family and friends and what they have to be thankful for this year.

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• If you've redecorated your kitchen, consider buying a chef's apron and embroidering your monogram or moniker on the front to match the color of the walls. You might want to add new dishtowels to match the wall color as well.
• Gel, a form of polyurethane, is a hot new furniture statement that takes the place of padding. The user just melts into the gel-like surface that comes in the shape of chairs and chaises in a variety of candy colors.
• To add an accent of sunshine to your new kitchen, fill a wrought iron bowl with ceramic lemons.

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• Buy new bath and spa items. Be sure you include bath gels or salts, a candle, a great smelling bar of soap, and a new scrubber for your bath. If you really want to splurge, buy new towels with your initials monogrammed on them. And if you have an extra CD player, consider bringing it into the bathroom as well.
• Start reading and relaxing each day in your home. Buy some new books, join a book club, or start a new magazine subscription.

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• Add a chair rail as an interesting architectural element that extends from the living room through the dining room to set off an ever-changing photography collection.
• Even in the winter, stay active in your garden--whether to weed, mulch, or plant. Get inspired by taking a stroll in a nearby botanical garden to see what new flower colors are available and how different plant materials are mixed.
• Hang wire or woven baskets as whimsical sculptures not only in a kitchen, but also in a family room or hall.

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• If your kitchen is small, mirror the backsplashes to expand space rather than use a solid material such as tile, wood or laminate.
• If space is at premium in your abode, consider covering a long wood table with glass to double as a desk, dining table, sideboard or bar.
• To break up space in a child's room in a pragmatic way, use a three-paneled cork board. This serves as a screen and doubles as a bulletin board on which to post precious artwork.

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• Tired of hardwood floors? The new trend today is bamboo. It can be dyed a color or kept a natural hue which gives a beach-like feel to your home. But buyer beware: cheap bamboo flooring can buckle and delaminate.
• If you love tea, start collecting tea items that will enhance your tea-drinking experience when the weather turns a bit cooler. There are tea strainers in various shapes, all sorts of teapots, cups, and trays to make the ritual of sipping tea more fun.

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• Transform a room into a magical place that makes you feel like you're outside looking up at the sky: Paint the room a pretty sky blue and paste gold astrological signs on the ceiling.
• Consider building a tree house in the backyard for children or grandchildren. There are kits available, or you can design one yourself with a little help from experts at your favorite home shopping store.
• During warm weather months, place a large empty basket in your fireplace and fill it with dried flowers. In winter, lay your fireplace with dry logs and newspaper, so that all you'll need to do is light it.

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• Be sure your property is sufficiently lit at night so you can use your outdoors for nighttime dining, chats, cocktails, etc. Place bulbs discreetly along the sides of the house, along walkways, and sometimes in trees to diffuse the light.
• Buy enough Citronella candles, lanterns and other aids to discourage bugs from visiting when you dine outside.
• Think about adding a front porch or verandah to your home. It adds an attractive look and can become a gathering spot for your neighborhood, like the old-fashioned stoops where city dwellers used to gather.

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• Plan to finish your outdoor maintenance before the summer ends. With trades people so busy, it could take months to get on your carpenter's, bricklayer's or painter's schedule.
• If you're looking for a different style of garden, consider an ecologically correct garden for your area. In the Midwest, you might try a "prairie-scape" if your house isn't too formal. If you live in the Southwest, you might want an arrangement of stones.
• Try decorating your door, or the front of your property, with a custom-designed address plaque in sold brass, bronze, copper or aluminum.

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• Consider building a screened in gazebo to create an attractive dining space in the shade outdoors. This not only offers a dramatic mood for food, but will add gorgeous simplicity to your property.
• Consider adding an attached sun porch or greenhouse to grow fruits and vegetables year-round and to park the summer plants that are now proliferating in your yard. Prices on prefab sun porches or greenhouses will be more reasonable than having one constructed custom.
• Birdhouses add pizzazz and can be a conversation piece. They come in a range of styles and colors with patterns and special features. You might even find one that duplicates the style of your home.

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• Buy an antique hutch, remove the door and use the shelves to display ceramics you picked up at a summer estate sale. Paint the back of the hutch a darker color than the rest of the piece to add depth and dimension.
• Do you have a yearning for a pet? Summertime is the best time to get a dog since the weather is warm, which makes training easier. Why not adopt from the Humane Society? To make life with your new friend easier, you might consider fencing part of or all of your yard.
• Summer is the season for barbecue. Stock your pantry with a hearty supply of accompaniments that can turn a bland meal into something special. Olives, roasted peppers, pimentos, soy sauce, fish sauces, and assortment of salsas, chili sauces and bean paste.

Right At Home Daily: From House to Home
This week's tips:

• Have all your windows washed to let more sunlight filter into your home. You can do it yourself or hire a company.
• If your weather will permit it, consider creating an outdoor kitchen. Purchase a grill, small portable refrigerator, and sink and install them in a handsome stone counter. Consider building a permanent outdoor fireplace for cooler evenings.
• To hang pots or even flower baskets outside, try an interesting and attractive chain of oxidized bronze thorns, ranging up to four inches in length.

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• Hand paint the cement or wood floor of a screened-in porch to look like a faux rug with diamond-shaped pattern and a squiggly border in favorite colors. Get young family members involved and ask them to splatter the paint like Jackson Pollack once did.
• Buy fresh herbs and plant them outside. Liven up your meals by adding fresh herbs from your own garden.
• Organize a special Father's Day (June 17) and invite dads who might be forgotten (whose children have grown and moved away, whose spouses have died, or who may be divorced). Make the food simple such as bratwurst, corn on the cob, and blueberry pie.

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p>Right At Home Daily: From House to Home

This week's tips:

• Organize a Flag Day party on June 14. Hoist your American flag, tell the generations to dress in red, white and blue, have everyone bring favorite American classics such as baked beans, potato salad, hamburgers, lemon meringue and cherry pies.
• Build bookcases along a wide hallway. They add an interesting visual element. If the hallway is wide enough, consider adding a built-in desk to be used as a homework station.
• Punch storage units into a bedroom or family room wall or hallway to store everything from linens to out-of-season clothing.

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• June is an ideal time to reseal or resurface your asphalt driveway. Sealing preserves the asphalt and is a relatively inexpensive to give your driveway a facelift. You can patch and reseal, do a more expensive overlay, or start from scratch and re-asphalt
• Mini, macro, wood, vinyl, vertical or horizontal blinds are an effective way to achieve privacy and control the flow of strong sunlight and air. You can even laminate the fabric on the slats of vertical blinds for a streamlined, custom look.

...and more tips!