Warm a Winter Room with Free Heat!

To save energy and heating costs I don’t turn on my furnace until it’s consistently 40 degrees (F) outside. That makes for some nippy nights when the outdoor temperatures dip down to 40 degrees in the evening. BRRRR!

I put extra blankets on my bed to snuggle under. However, my bedroom has a pitched ceiling. I loved the high ceiling in that room when we bought the house until the first winter - because heat rises.  It is a spendy room to theat and even then it’s still cold.

Reversing the blades on a ceiling fan would do the trick but I don’t have a ceiling fan in that room. Not to worry, I have a free space heater for my bedroom and I bet you do too!

The Green Bag Lady

I don’t support laws that ban plastic shopping bags because it ends up hurting people that cannot afford to buy reusable shopping bags. I’d rather a store or city offer incentives for using your own bag because I think you get more flies with honey than vinegar. That’s why I had to interview Teresa VanHatten-Granath when I heard about her Green Bag Lady Project.

In an attempt to make her corner of the world greener, Teresa makes and gives away free cloth shopping bags! The project started in her own college classroom. She now has people using her free cloth shopping bags around the world!

Green Bag Lady Bag Number 111170.

How long have you sewn? How did you get started making shopping tote bags?

How Low Does Your Furnace Go?

My friends and family consider me the Energy Saving Maven because I reduced my home’s natural gas and electric use by 32% using cheap home improvements and new habits. So it wasn’t a surprise when a friend of mine asked me to come to his house and help him lower his sky high heating bill last winter.

I trudged through the new fallen snow on his sidewalk and rang the doorbell. He answered it wearing shorts and a t-shirt.

It was easy to find the answer to his high energy use and heating bill.

I don’t expect you to lower your daytime temperatures to my frigid 58 degrees (F), but if you accept Crunchy Chicken's Freeze Your Buns Challenge and lower your heating temperature by only a few degrees it will do a world of good. In the case of my friend, he has rescue birds so he came up with lowering his daytime temperature from 75 to 68 degrees (F.)

This year, I’m using the One Million Acts of Green Give the Gift of Green Facebook app to send my friend a reminder to not to jack his furnace this winter.

You can use the One Million Acts of Green Give the Gift of Green Facebook app this November trough December to send a green act as a “gift” that publishes to their News Feed. If the person isn’t on Facebook, you can send your message to them as an e-card.

How low does your temperature go during the winter?

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Disclosure:  Rockfish Interactive, in partnership with  Cisco are compensating me for my considerable time on this project. However, my ideas, words, and opinions are my own and are not influenced by this compensation. See what the other ambassadors have to say about One Million Acts of Green: Crunchy Domestic Goddess, Green Your Décor and Green and Clean Mom.

Reclaimed Barnwood Floors - Yea or Nay?

I love decorating and doing projects with reclaimed and recycled materials. I also like hardwood floors. Schlabach Woodworks is an Ohio company that combined my two loves and recently used reclaimed wood from an old Ohio barn to create these swoony hardwood floors in a house featured in the 2010 Parade of Homes.

 Look at that character!

You wont' find this in a big box store!

They also make staircases and mantle pieces from old barn wood too. Sadly I can't give you any more information than what I just did because Schlabach Woodworks doesn't have a web site due to their Amish roots.

Very green. Unique, but spendy and much nicer than laminate flooring. Although with a reclaimed barn wood floor like this, you really wouldn’t need to replace it as you eventually would with carpeting. It should last a lifetime!

What do you think? Reclaimed barn wood floors – yea or nay?


Looking for more wood flooring ideas? Check out the following options - and more! - below

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Trying Recycled Content Toilet Paper, Take Three

Monday I talked about how my family is doing a blind tushie test of two brands of recycled content toilet paper. White Cloud sent us two rolls of toilet paper marked A and B. They also said we should “have fun” with the testing.

Husband and I took this as a cue to do scientific experiments like on Mythbusters. That didn’t work out very well because all of our favorite episodes are the ones that involve blowing stuff up. Apparently they don’t sell C4 and blast shields to just anybody, let alone let you use the your local police bomb range to test durability by blowing up rolls of toilet paper. The nerve!

Make a (Cute) No Solicitors Sign

One of the drawbacks of living in a condo community with nicely planned blocks of houses with sidewalks is that we are ripe for the picking when it comes to door to door salespeople. Now that it’s election season, it’s becoming downright unbearable! I’ve had more than one person come to the door pimping the same issue despite asking them to please take them off our visitation list. It's not that I'm politically unaware, I am more than you know. It's just that I don't want my Saturday HGTV and DIY Network coffee + snuggling doggie + dream time interrupted three times in one day with a parade of people knocking on my door about the same thing. The worst offenders are the fake water testing companies trying to tell us our water will kill us unless  we buy their product allow them to test our water.

I decided to make a No Solicitors sign.

I bought a frame at Goodwill and sanded it.

 

 It doesn't look like much but this frame is an achievement. I went to Goodwill looking for picture frames and came out of Goodwill with picture frames instead of picture frames plus the dozen other things that tempted me. Yay me!

I used leftover outdoor paint from my porch chair revamp project to paint my picture frame since it will live outside.