Simple Green Living Room

Babies and small children come with a lot of packaging and it can be a challenge to even think about green living when you are lost in a sea of disposable diapers, wet wipes and laundry. Unless you are a committed eco-mommy and have already embraced cloth diapers, you probably have a guilty feeling that it isn't possible to be truly green and energy efficient with a baby in the house and a busy lifestyle.

But disposable diapers aren't the beginning and end of an eco-friendly family lifestyle. Nobody said it has to be all or nothing. Even if they are essential to the smooth running of your household, there are still plenty of other smaller green living measures that you can take to help the environment. In doing so you will also be raising your kids to be aware of green issues, which is an important part of building a sustainable future. After all they are the ones who will inherit the earth from us, so energy awareness is essential to their education from an early age.

Try a few of these simple green living tips to increase the efficiency of your energy use and reduce the impact your home has on the environment. Remember the green mantra: Reduce, Re-use, Recycle. Reduce the amount of resources you consume, re-use things like paper, plastic and cloth wherever possible and only then recycle what you can no longer use. This saves you money and makes the best possible use of resources.

1. Use both sides of the paper
Kids love drawing. Before you know it they can have accumulated a stack of artworks equivalent to a small tree. Encourage them to use both sides of the paper. Re-use office scrap paper for drawing on before you re-cycle it.

2. Switch to cloth table napkins
Disposable paper table napkins not only use up an immense number of trees to produce, if you count up how many each household can get through in a year, but they also end up in landfill sites. Get your family a bunch of colorful cloth napkins, or make some from leftover fabric scraps or old soft cotton shirts, and use them at family meals. They take up little space in the laundry and can be used several times before washing; just give each family member a different color or else an individual napkin ring to identify their napkin.

3. Recycle
If you're not already re-cycling find out about options in your area. There may be a local pick-up scheme if you separate out your garbage or you may have to find a drop-off point. Kids will catch on quickly if you have separate bins for re-cycled paper, glass and plastics and it's a great start to educating them about the environment.

4. Hang out your laundry
Whenever the weather allows, hang out your laundry on the clothes line rather than using the dryer. Older kids can help with the pegging out and folding afterward. Your clothes will last longer and you'll save a lot on electricity.

5. Use energy saving light bulbs
Replace your light bulbs with the curly energy efficient bulbs, as the old ones give out. Switch off lights when you leave a room and make sure any lights left on at night, for kids that are scared of the dark, are of a low wattage, energy saving variety.

These may seem like small measures, that won't do much to save the planet, but think about it this way: if every household in the US were just to switch to cloth napkins for a year, millions of trees would be saved, as well as the energy and water consumed in turning them into paper. Each small measure adds up.
The choice of color scheme for the living room is more likely to relate to how the room is used than to other criteria. If the room is large and combines sitting and dining areas, then each zone can be used to illustrate the fresh look by using different combinations of the chosen colour scheme, or by separating them entirely. Color washes are effective at maintaining the light, fresh feel.