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A great overview of green building techniques, materials, products and technologies that are either currently available or will be in the near future. Author Dan Chiras provides practical information for home buyers, owner-builders and anyone interested in building for a sustainable future.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $29.95. AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

Create a gorgeous and greener home with the help of Green Remodeling, a Mother Earth News Book for Wiser Living. It includes energy-efficient, healthful and attractive choices in building materials, heating and cooling systems and appliances. It's easy-to-read and well illustrated.

Whether because of changing lifestyles or simply because houses are becoming outdated, millions of North Americans are renovating their homes every year, spending more money annually on renovation than on new home construction. But renovations can be fraught with unintended consequences like indoor air pollution. How do you remodel in a healthy, environmentally friendly way?

Green Remodeling is a comprehensive guide. It first points out the advantages of remodeling. Buildings are responsible for 40% of worldwide energy flow and material use, so how you remodel can make a difference. Upgrading furnaces, cabinets and toilets means less fossil fuel pollution, reduced resource depletion and fewer health risks. Green remodeling is more energy-efficient, more resource-conserving, healthier for occupants, and more affordable to create, operate and maintain.

Green Remodeling then discusses simple green renovation solutions for homeowners, focusing on key aspects of the building - including foundations, framing, plumbing, windows, heating and finishes. Room by room, it outlines the intricate connections that make the house work as a system. For example, how new windows may affect the structure and mechanical systems of the rooms below, the health of the family, and the future of old-growth forests. Then, in an easy-to-read format complete with checklists, personal stories, expert insights and an extensive resource list, it covers easy ways to save energy, conserve natural resources and protect the health of loved ones. Addressing all climates, this is a perfect resource for conventional homeowners, as well as architects and remodeling contractors.

About the authors:

David Johnston has been developing green building programs for the last 10 years. Named one of the top 50 remodelers in the country by Remodeling Magazine in 1990, he developed the first green remodeling program in the country in Boulder, Colorado. He trains remodelers across the U.S. and is creating a national green certification program for the National Association of the Remodeling Industry. He is president of What's Working and Lightworks Construction, Inc. He is from Boulder, Colorado.

Kim Master is a Green Building Consultant and Senior Associate with What's Working. She was previously Ecommerce/Project Manager with Care2.com, the largest environmental website for healthy living and a healthy planet. She is from Boulder, Colorado.

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In a tight economy, this book offers clear financial benefits by helping homeowners immediately cut their utility bills. Many of these smaller home improvements require only a modest investment, and give readers an edge when they sell their homes: Buyers are looking for energy efficiency, and they are also tuned into green health and environmental concerns.

The book's projects include quick and easy, low- or no-cost tasks — like insulating a water heater, sealing foundation cracks or painting with insulating paint — as well as bigger-ticket items, such as installing a new energy-efficient heating system, windows or green flooring. The more than 65 "Go Green" tips highlighted throughout the book give readers ideas to make their homes and lifestyles greener.

Projects include:

• Green flooring and paint options
• Environmentally friendly cabinetry and countertops
• Whole-house insulation and weather-stripping
• High-efficiency heating and cooling
• Water conservation
• Efficient lighting, appliances and plumbing fixtures, including Energy Star and WaterSense models
• Solar electric and water heating systems
• Eco-friendly roofing and siding
• Energy-efficient windows, doors and skylights
• Green materials for patios, walkways and driveways
• Landscaping and irrigation for water conservation and energy

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $37.95. AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

Some 40 percent of North Americans live in homes built before 1940, and when it comes time to remodel or restore our older homes, homeowners and contractors can find themselves lost in a morass of wildly divergent information and opinion. With Green Restorations, author Aaron Lubeck brings his expertise as a restoration contractor and preservation consultant to this first-of-its-kind guide, leading the reader through the steps for restoring historic building using sustainable practices and green building techniques.

In a readily accessible room-by-room and system-by-system format, Green Restorations covers rehabilitation and remodelling questions applicable to old homes, focusing on the core techniques and debates often seen in practice. Here you'll find the answers to restoration questions, such as:

• Is sealing my old crawl space a good idea?
• Should I replace or rehabilitate my windows?
• Are there historic aspects of my home I need to preserve, and what can I change?
• What are the cultural, environmental and financial implications of my proposed changes?
• Do residential historic tax credits apply to my home and how can I access them?

Written in such a way as to be accessible for homeowners but technical enough for contractors, this book will appeal to anyone trying to green an older home while preserving its historic and cultural significance.

About the Author

Aaron Lubeck is a partner with Trinity Design/Build, a restoration and preservation consultancy in North Carolina that has won numerous preservation awards. He is a member of the United States Green Building Council who has completed the first historic building to be LEED-certified in North Carolina.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $21.95. AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

When does a green home project make financial sense? The authors of this book provide the answer to this and other questions relating to the cost (and relative value) of environmentally friendly home improvements. Eric Corey Freed and Kevin Daum are experts, respectively, in green building and in financing custom homes. In this information-packed book, they walk readers through 50 green home projects and break them down according to the positive impact they have on the environment, as well as the impact they may have (both positive and negative) on the reader's wallet.

They evaluate a wide array of projects, including insulating pipes, weatherizing doors and windows, composting and recycling trash, installing a solar hot water heater, installing green countertops, upgrading appliances, building with reclaimed materials and installing radiant heat. This unique perspective on going green is a reference that green-leaning homeowners simply cannot do without.

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From a lakeside cabin to a hilltop farmhouse, from an urban brownstone to a suburban ranch — any house can be beautified with decorative pieces crafted from found bits of the woodland landscape, such as pine cones, moss, bark, twigs and river rocks. Artist and author Marlene Hurley Marshall shows you how to use responsibly collected materials to create stylish wreaths, frames, furniture, collages, potpourri, birdhouses, garden pots and much more. Featuring luscious photography by Sabine Vollmer von Falken, Woodland Style gives you the inspiration and instruction you need to enjoy the peace and beauty of the woods and meadows in your own home.

About the author
Marlene Marshall is a painter/collage artist, arts educator, designer, and author of Making Bits and Pieces Mosaics (Storey, 1998), Shell Chic (Storey, 2002) and Woodland Style (Storey, 2010). For more than a decade, Marshall has been conducting studio art classes in mosaic and shell design applications, as well as the visual arts. She frequently lectures at museums, art schools and private clubs along the East Coast. She also designs and consults with communities on outdoor mosaic projects for public walkways and parks. Marshall has appeared on both the Home and Garden and DIY networks. Her work has been exhibited and sold in galleries and museum shops throughout North America. She lives in Hudson, N.Y.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $19.95 AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST! Find, cut and dry your own lumber. This essential guide will save you money and expand your knowledge of wood.

For woodworkers who want to purchase wood wisely and save money by finding, cutting and drying it on their own, this guide from the experts at American Woodworker is a must. Along with learning the most economical way to buy and process lumber, there are a number of how-to's in this book, including:

• Interpreting rough lumber
• Working with defects
• Deciding which grade is most economical for the project
• Re-sawing thick wood
• Storing lumber
• Using boards that are not perfect

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Build your way to a more self-sufficient lifestyle with step-by-step projects for backup and supplementary utilities -- including independent water, heat and electricity -- growing and storing food, raising small livestock, beekeeping and more. Many of the projects require basic materials available at your everyday home center, but this book also provides valuable DIY resources for solar, hydro, greenhouse and gardening needs.

This book will help you build security with utility backup systems and become more sustainable, resulting in less dependence on city systems for basic needs. Whether you have a city plot or simply pots, this book includes all of the information needed to plan, build and succeed with greater self-sufficiency.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $39.95 AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

Green roofs — the ultimate in sustainable building practices — continue to generate enormous interest and enthusiasm among architects, landscape designers, and urban planners. Increasingly strict stormwater regulations and the appeal of LEED-related projects have also boosted the popularity and desirability of green roofs. Those who want to build green roofs, however, have few resources to guide them. Until now, no book has taken a comprehensive look at how to effectively adapt green-roof technology to the variable and extreme North American climate, and how to design projects that will function and endure as successfully as those in Germany, Switzerland, and other European countries.

This book fills the gap by providing an overview of practices and techniques that have been effective in North America. The authors offer options regarding structure, function, horticulture, and logistics, as well as surveys of actual projects and analyses of why they have or haven’t succeeded. Approachable and reader-friendly, the manual clearly explains how these complex systems function and how to plan and carry out projects successfully from concept through construction and maintenance. Ideally suited to professionals (including architects, landscape architects, engineers, and designers) and their clients, it brings together key lessons from leaders in the field. Numerous photographs highlight the range of design possibilities and show green roofs both during construction and at various stages of maturity.

At last, those seeking basic information about how to design and build green roofs have a concise, authoritative guide to this exciting new technology.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $29.95 AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

In just a few years, green roofs have gone from a horticultural curiosity to a booming growth industry — primarily because the environmental benefits of extensively planted roofs are now beyond dispute, whether for industrial or governmental complexes or for private homes in urban or suburban settings. Despite the high level of interest in green roofs, until now there has been no reliable reference devoted exclusively to the various species of drought-tolerant plants that are suitable for use on extensive green roofs. Green Roof Plants fills that void. The book contains photographs and cultural information for more than 200 species and cultivars of plants, including valuable data on moisture needs, heat tolerance, hardiness, bloom color, foliage characteristics and height. Concise, accurate, and easy to use, this book is destined to become an indispensable practical reference guide, not just for architects, landscape designers, engineers, and environmentalists, but also for environmentally conscious home gardeners.