Searching for Green Furniture
My dreams of a new bed have finally been fulfilled. We were a bit overwhelmed by the array of bed choices out there, not to mention the price tags. I must confess, I ruled out all the ultra-natural beds immediately because they are super expensive and there’s no place to try them out in town. I feel a little bad about that decision but… only a little. I’ve been dreaming of a super comfortable bed for months and some how all those descriptions of natural wool stuffing or organic rubber foam just don’t sound as nice as a standard bouncy mattress and boxspring set.
So we checked out a few different bed stores, lying on each bed for five minutes as recommended by Consumer Reports. We found a very nice Serta mattress set at Comfort Solutions but the $950 price tag was just too much to swallow. In the end, we purchased a less fancy Serta bed from Sam’s Club, scoring low points for both environmental friendliness and social responsibility. Sorry, folks. I haven’t shopped at a Walmart in almost ten years but we do go to Sam’s Club from time to time and the bed seemed like the best option out there. We plan to sleep on this bed for years to come so I feel the overall time-lapse impact is fairly minimal.
It’s really hard to furnish a home in an eco-friendly way. As Andy lamented, it seems like the choice is between ultra-expensive natural home furnishings or ultra-cheap crap from box stores. We have had a fair amount of luck with used furniture. Our couches and endtables came from the local furniture rental store American Rental. Our kitchen cart and a couple of lamps came from Goodwill. Our previous bed was a dumpster dive find.
But most of our furniture is hand-me-downs from friends and family. Two dressers, a credenza, a kitchen table, a night stand, five bookshelves, a rug, and I’m sure a few other things have made their way into our homes from the homes of our support network. It’s a little hard to plan for their appearance but it is comforting to me to walk around the house and have each piece of furniture tell me a story and remind me of an old friend.
The trick to our style of home furnishing is to be flexible and patient. Sure, we’ll go out and buy something new from the local box store if we really need it, but most of the time we stick with the objects that drift into our life at the right time and enjoy the hunt of checking out Goodwill and garage sales and listings on Craigslist. So far, so good and if it’s not truly eco-chic, at least we’re keeping usable items out of the local landfill.
When you hear about sustainable living, you tend to get a focus on global impact. How much CO2 are you contributing to global warming? How many Earths would your lifestyle require? Those are important questions but my concept of living sustainably starts at home.
They say the devil is in the details and if it’s true with anything, it’s true with home remodeling. Our biggest challenge was dealing with trim - window trim, door trim, and baseboards. We had to take it down to get the paneling off and we knew we would have to put it back up. Unfortunately, we broke a few pieces while prying it off the wall so we also bought a few replacement pieces which had to be cut to size using a miter saw. Miter saws are cool because they let you cut at an angle. Picture two pieces of baseboard meeting at the corner of a room. If they’re both cut square, like a normal piece of lumber, then they come together and make a little lump in the corner. However, with a miter saw you can cut each one diagonally so they piece together and the baseboard is the same thickness all the way around the room. At least in theory. It turns out I’m a bit eager with the saw. (And yes, I did use the safety glasses when I was actually cutting.)
All the salvageable trim had to have the nails removed, which was tedious but not very photogenic. Painting the trim was a little more photogenic. We used some of the old carpet padding as a drop cloth so we could be messy without ruining the floor of the garage. (It’s also nice and squishy to walk on, especially compared with concrete.)
Tomorrow is my 30th birthday so we’re headed to the lake for a day of boating and swimming. I’ve never driven a giant boat with a slide; it should be exciting! For tonight, I’ll enjoy my last evening in my 20’s in my new house.
Remember that 
But we thought you might enjoy a few remodeling photos. That photo at the top is the “before” picture of the front bedroom. That’s what it looked when the previous owners lived there. We really like this bedroom because it has windows facing south and east and just generally has a nice sunny, open feel. However, we weren’t too excited about the painted paneling and the boring-yet-ugly carpeting. Luckily, we checked and found out that there were beautiful hardwood floors underneath the ugly carpeting!
So we pulled down the paneling, ripped up the carpeting, and painted the plaster walls with a blue-green-gray shade of Aura paint, a low-VOC paint manufactured by Benjamin Moore. It seemed like a reasonably green option and we managed to donate the carpet to a friend who will use it to make weed-free paths through her garden. (We’re still looking for someone who wants carpet padding and old paneling.)
I hadn’t planned to talk again about 
Anyone who’s every been on a diet knows that it’s easy to get discouraged and give up because of a few early setbacks. This is such a common occurence that 
Step two is to make a boiling brine mixture. We used a basic recipe from 
Step four is canning. You can skip the canning if you plan to keep your pickles in the fridge and eat them fairly quickly but if you want them to keep for months, you need to can them. Since pickles are pretty acidic, they are less likely to harbor bacteria than low acid foods like green beans. This means you can can them using the boiling water method, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like - boil the cans in a big pot for 10-20 minutes (depending on jar size and altitude). This sterilizes the content of the jar and also pushes most of the air out, creating a vaccuum seal. If we were dealing with low acid foods like green beans we would have used a pressure canner, which increases the pressure as well as the temperature to make it as inhospitable to bacteria as possible.
That’s it! Making pickles definitely takes some work but it’s a lot of fun when you make it a party. Stephanie is always a blast to hang out with and being a dill pickle addict, she kept the energy high. Lindsey had just moved to Bloomington on Friday and was excited to stock her pantry with her own pickles. She is also already planning to recreate the 
