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Keep your home clean, green and healthy! Common, nontoxic kitchen ingredients such as baking soda, lemon and vinegar are wonderful household cleaners and great replacements for harmful chemical cleansers. Pair them with essential oils to clean, disinfect and freshen every room. With more than 150 recipes for all-natural, easy-to-prepare solutions, you can clean wood, glass, tile, porcelain, fabric, carpets and much more — naturally and safely.

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Global warming. Rising fuel prices. Dependency on foreign energy. Never have so many Americans been more motivated to invest in renewable energy right in their residence. Leaving the technical jargon and contractor's lingo behind, this book offers clear, practical solutions that any homeowner can put to use right now.

Cutting through the confusing requirements and costs, this book allows average homeowners to find solutions that best fit their setup, lifestyle and budget by explaining each possible energy solution with clear, practical illustrations and straightforward descriptions.

From which type of solar panel fits your roof and sun exposure to finding the most efficient part of your yard to set up a small wind turbine, Renewable Energy for Your Home is packed with information. It shows how to determine if geothermal energy is an option, and includes hints, tips and do-it-yourself techniques to reduce carbon footprints and save on ever-rising energy bills.

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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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Taking its inspiration from John Seymour's best-selling classic, The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, Self Sufficiency for the 21st Century brings the subject up to date by showing how to live a more sustainable life that everyone can access, whether living in the city, the suburbs or the country. Sharing their experiences, tips and techniques, father-and-son team Dick and James Strawbridge show how to make the practical changes that will have a big impact on your life — without having to transform your lifestyle. Covering eco-projects, plant-by-plant and animal-by-animal identification, how to produce little or no waste and remove our dependence upon fossil fuels, and so much more, Self Sufficiency for the 21st Century includes something for everyone — from urban apartment dwellers to suburbanites to those living in the countryside.

Recommended Product for Wiser Living: Today, more than ever before, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the very best inspiration and information about greener, more sustainable lifestyles, MOTHER EARTH NEWS is recommending books to readers. For 40 years, MOTHER EARTH NEWS has been North America’s “Original Guide to Living Wisely,” creating books and magazines for people with a passion for self-reliance and a desire to live in harmony with nature.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $17.95 AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

This celebrated, essential handbook for the urban homesteading movement shows how to grow and preserve your own food, clean your house without toxins, raise chickens, gain energy independence, and more. Step-by-step projects, tips and anecdotes will help get you started homesteading immediately. The Urban Homestead is also a guidebook to the larger movement and will point you to the best books and Internet resources on self-sufficiency topics.

Written by city dwellers for city dwellers, this copiously illustrated, two-color instruction book proposes a paradigm shift that will improve our lives, our community and our planet. By growing our own food and harnessing natural energy, we are planting seeds for the future of our cities.

Recommended Product for Wiser Living: Today, more than ever before, our society is seeking ways to live more conscientiously. To help bring you the very best inspiration and information about greener, more sustainable lifestyles, MOTHER EARTH NEWS is recommending books to readers. For 40 years, MOTHER EARTH NEWS has been North America’s “Original Guide to Living Wisely,” creating books and magazines for people with a passion for self-reliance and a desire to live in harmony with nature.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $24.95. AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

This do-it-yourself guide makes it easy to upgrade residential and commercial lighting to reduce costs and environmental impact while maintaining or even improving the quality of the lighting. Filled with step-by-step instructions, Green Lighting shows you how to save money and energy with light-emitting diodes (LEDs), compact fluorescent lighting (CFL), solar lights, windows, skylights, fixtures, controls and other bright ideas. Methods for calculating return on investment, plus recommended sources for energy-efficient products, are included in this practical resource.

Green Lighting covers:

Color temperature measurements
In-depth details on the differences between LEDs and CFLs
How utilities bill for electricity usage
Comparing wattage and determining energy savings
ENERGY STAR® ratings
Purchasing appropriate bulbs, fixtures and sensors
Developing a comprehensive green lighting plan for your entire home, office or commercial environment
Incandescent, halogen and gas-discharge lighting
Solar and next-generation lighting

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This definitive guide covers commercial and residential geothermal heating, ventilation, and air conditioning technologies and explains how to take advantage of their money- and energy-saving features. Geothermal HVAC: Green Heating and Cooling reviews the array of choices currently available, offers market values for systems based on varying options and conditions, and describes how to pair the best systems for each application and budget. Whether you're a contractor or a consumer, you'll find out what you need to know to implement a geothermal HVAC system in a retrofit or new construction project, and start benefiting from this sustainable, affordable technology.

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More and more homebuyers and homebuilders are focusing on "right-sizing" their dream home instead of mortgaging their dreams away. Building Today's Dream Home gives you instruction and advice on best practices for building a smaller, more cost-effective house without compromising comfort or quality. Building a right-sized, energy-efficient home can free up your investment capital for the retirement years, and this book gives you the information you need to build the right home for your needs.

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CLEARANCE ITEM. PREVIOUS RETAIL PRICE WAS $25.00 AVAILABLE ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

Prefabulous and Sustainable dispels the negative myths associated with prefab homes and shows the reader how beautiful and remarkably green prefab homes are.

In this guide to prefab home-building, author Sheri Koones demystifies the prefabricated house by using 25 unique homes to showcase how factory-built homes are greener, more efficient, sturdier and more cost-effective than site-built homes. The book is divided into three categories — green, greener, greenest — and the homes featured vary in style, design, type of construction and size. All of the homes included in Prefabulous and Sustainable have been customized to create a level of sustainability beyond the inherent qualities of prefab.

Written in an easy to understand and approachable style, this book walks the readers through each of the homes, explaining the materials, strategies and systems used to create a sustainable living environment. Photographs, captions, floorplans and sidebars show readers that green living is not as complicated as one might think, and attainable for everyone. Also included is a resource guide, making this book a hands-on guide for homebuilders.
About the Author
Sheri Koones is a widely respected author who helps readers understand that getting the house of their dreams can be done in an ecologically responsible way. Her book, Prefabulous, explored the variety, beauty and eco-friendly benefits of prefab homes and recently won the prestigious Gold Award in the 2008 Robert Bruss Real Estate Book Awards from NAREE. Koones is a member of the National Association of Real Estate Editors, the Sustainable Building Industry Council, and the American Society of Journalists and Authors. She is also a columnist for Home Resource Guide and a freelance writer and speaker. She lives in Connecticut.