Remodeling Your Dining Room With Eco-Friendly Principles

Here are some considerations and possibilities when you're remodeling your dining room with eco-friendliness in mind.

Big, beautiful bay windows can be a great choice for a dining room. Not only do they provide a great view of the outdoors, but they can let in plenty of natural light. Optimizing your home for natural light use (a process called daylighting) can help reduce your dependence on electricity-powered lighting. You can also install a skylight or solar tube to help provide more light.

Don't forget that thin, uninsulated windows can work against your eco-friendly goals, though. Make sure that any windows you install are at least double-glazed and Impact Resistant to meet the impact rating and wind codes for Florida. Either way, check to make sure your windows have low-emissivity glass, which can reduce the amount of unwanted heat gain in summer and heat loss in winter.

Updating your dining room floor doesn't have to mean purchasing all-new materials. You can source your materials in a more environmentally friendly way by looking for reclaimed flooring, or even other reclaimed materials that could be repurposed as flooring. Roof slates, for example, can make a beautiful flooring material after being reclaimed from a roof.

If you live up north and have a basement or crawl space under your home, you'll want to take this opportunity to think about insulating your floor. Several types of insulation, such as foam insulation or fiberglass batts, may be available for this task.

Some floor materials insulate against heat better than others, but in general, you should consider adding an underlayment to increase insulation value further. Increased insulation is considered environmentally friendly for a number of reasons, such as:

With over 50,000 self-storage unit facilities in the country, the amount of electricity, fossil fuels, and greenhouse gases involved in the storage industry is hard to even imagine.

Keeping your belongings at home, if possible, can help you reduce your environmental footprint by avoiding self-storage units. One way to make room for your belongings at home is to add more storage space to your house.

You may be able to add storage capacity relatively easily anytime you're remodeling, such as cabinets built into the walls or in your attic space. Your dining room is less likely to be optimized for storage capability than other rooms of your house (such as the kitchen), so updating it with extra storage could be a big step forward.

These are just a few of the possibilities to consider when you're planning a dining room remodel to help it match the rest of your eco-friendly lifestyle. For more information about the types of remodels we can perform on different areas of your home, get in touch with Genuine Home Builders, Inc., today.