Eco Friendly Furniture Refinishing

Eco friendly furniture refinishing helps to reduce our demands on the environment by preserving furniture created long ago, and prevents cutting down and wasting trees growing today. It also helps us to improve our homes with updated fine quality pieces of furniture that might otherwise be overlooked, and clog our waste dumps and landfills. Fine, old trees were cut down in decades or centuries past, and utilized in the production of furniture that is eventually in need of maintenance, not discarding. Old furniture finishes, especially twentieth century finishes including lacquer, turn dark, translucent, and finally semi-opaque, hiding the beauty of the wood beneath. An old finish is then susceptible to whitish heat and humidity marks, becomes brittle and scratches easily. If a new, natural wood finish strikes you as unappealing, then a vibrant, more contemporary colored lacquer finish may be applied instead. Perhaps a glossy bright yellow, orange, or blue is more what you have in mind for your old, tired looking Danish modern furniture ?

If you prefer a natural wood finish, keep in mind that beauty is skin deep, the damages are just to the finish, and you will start over when the finish is removed. If the old finish is removed using Eco friendly furniture refinishing techniques, then a new finish applied, the furniture can display the original beauty of the wood when it was created, with an antique patina that is irreplaceable. The quality and species of wood available and used then was generally better than what is available today.

Whether colored lacquer or natural wood finish is more attractive to you, there is little comparison between craftsmanship of yesterday with today’s shoddy manufacturing. Old furniture you find that was made more than twenty years ago, will outlast just about anything made today.

Eco friendly furniture refinishing is about more than just preserving old furniture, and not wasting resources to produce new flake board, melamine, laminate, or MDF and their waste products in the production of new furniture. Critical to Eco friendly furniture refinishing involves the use of less toxic strippers and removers to take off the old finish, prior to applying a new finish. Over the past fifteen years or so, removers have been developed to strip off old finishes, that are not lye based, or methylene chloride based. These modern, environmentally improved furniture removers include N Methyl-2 Pyrrolidone, or NMP, and other enzymatic removers that facilitate the removal of finishes without such toxic or ozone damaging chemicals as the older generation of furniture finish removers. Other Eco friendly furniture refinishing removers include the use of ceramic or quartz emitter infrared lamps to remove paint and heavily built up finishes, leaving no toxic remover waste or organic solvent to evaporate into the atmosphere at all.

Living on our planet today, we have a responsibility to tomorrows’ generations. Preserving our heritage and the environment is something all can appreciate. The vintage antique, or designer furniture we admire from the 50’s, 60’s, or 70’s, including Eames, mid century modern, space age, op art or pop art is often available in local thrift shops, or from eBay, from yard sales, or flea markets. Often, you need look no further than in your own homes to find candidates for refinishing. Open your imagination to wider refinishing possibilities for such handsomely designed furniture, and you will be helping yourself, our society, and the environment for a brighter tomorrow.

Renewable & Alternative Energy Resources: http://www.alternativeenergybase.com

Olek Lejbzon & Co. takes care of all your furniture refinishing , restoration and re upholstery needs ranging from a single kitchen chair requiring re caning to refinishing, reupholstering, and repairing all of the furniture. For more information please visit: Eco Friendly Furniture Refinishing

Eco Friendly Flooring Options That Will Wow You

If you're remodeling your home, or building your dream home from scratch (lucky you!), installing a brand new floor might be on your list. There are many materials to choose from, each with different pros, cons, and looks. If you are trying to live green (make environmentally friendly remodeling choices), you may want to consider an eco-friendly flooring material. There are quite a few options out there, so let's take a look:

• Cork Flooring:

You're familiar with the cork you find stopping up wine bottles, of course, but you may never have walked on a cork floor. It's the same material, just formed into tiles or planks and stuck down on the sub-floor. Since it is lightweight, installation is fairly painless.

Cork is considered eco-friendly because it's harvested from sustainable resources. It comes from the bark of the cork oak tree (which can be collected without harming the tree itself).

Cork's unique look makes it a fun floor choice, but there are practical reasons for choosing it as well. It acts as an insulator, absorbing sound and softening impacts (for instance, if you lay cork in the kitchen, a dropped dish probably won't break). It's also an easier material to stand on for long periods than floors made from ceramic tiles, stone, etc.

• Reclaimed Hardwood Floors:
  

If you love the look of hardwoods (who doesn't?) but can't reconcile yourself to having trees cut down just so you can get a new living room floor, there may still be a way for you to get the floor of your dreams. Think reclaimed wood.

Reclaimed hardwood floors are made with timbers recycled from old structures, such as dilapidated barns, schoolhouses, libraries, etc. There are a number of companies who buy the wood that would otherwise end up in a junkyard and refinish it to create planks suitable for residential floors. So basically you can a new hardwood floor without any new trees being cut down.

If you're wondering if these reused boards are structurally sound, they are. In fact, many people tout them as superior to the planks made from today's trees. The wood used in these older buildings came from old-growth forests, from older first generation trees; on the other hand, today's hardwood floors are made from wood harvested from tree farms, where the trees never truly reach maturity before being cut down.

Have a floor made from reclaimed wood and you'll be getting quality, character, and history in one swoop.

• Bamboo Flooring:

Bamboo is another flooring material that is catching on in popularity. It is considered eco-friendly because bamboo is a fast-growing grass, rather than a tree, and farms can grow a shoot to maturity in just a few years.

Though bamboo is somewhat similar to hardwood floors, it has a distinct look, and some people prefer that uniqueness to hardwoods. It is a sturdy, durable material and will last just as long as wood. Though there aren't as many varieties as there are species of wood, different finishes can create different looks for you to choose from.

The three flooring materials we have discussed—bamboo, hardwoods, and cork--are all considered eco-friendly. As an added bonus, they are all relatively easy to maintain. No vacuum cleaner required here! They are also good choices for allergy sufferers. With bamboo, hardwoods, and cork, there is no place for pet dander, pollens, mold, mildew, dust, etc. to hide. Compare this to the nooks and crannies you get with carpets, and you'll see why more and more people are choosing these other materials.

TC Thorn writes articles on home improvement and flooring. You can read more on hardwood floors at her site.

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Eco-Friendly Interior Design

Interior design is all about creating aesthetically pleasing spaces that are safe, practical and in harmony with the rest of the surroundings. In order to carry this out effectively we must source the best materials, furniture and fixtures and fittings for the job, and in doing so, we inevitably have an impact on the environment albeit inadvertently.

These days with so much emphasis being placed on global climate change, reducing consumption, and recycling, interior design can be a bit daunting if we want to limit our carbon footprint and still get the effect we want. However, armed with the right information, it needn't be a big challenge and we can still create beautiful rooms that are stylish, healthy and that are environmentally friendly too. So where do we begin?

First of all it's important to note that every single thing we buy has an impact on the environment somewhere along the line either, from the way they are extracted, manufactured and processed, or from the distances they have to travel to end up in our home. Take for example paint, wood, glass, metal, textiles and furniture, each of which can have a negative impact if we don't know what to look out for but with a little effort and forethought, we are able to find eco friendly alternatives.

Paint

Conventional paint contains solvents and lot of other harsh chemicals and toxins but it is possible to source paints that have a reduced effect on the environment and that don't contain solvents, which are not only a much healthier option as they won't release harmful gases into your home and the atmosphere, they can be just as effective.

Wood

If possible, try to buy wood that is grown in a local forest so it doesn't have to travel long distances to end up in your home. Also, choose woods that don't have a negative effect on the environment. Look out for the FSC symbol which stands for Forestry Stewardship Council, an international non-profit organization that will ensure that when you buy you will not be contributing to global forest destruction and threatening the livelihoods of people who depend on the forest or timber to survive.

Glass and Metal

Glass and metal are fairly easy to recycle and one of the advantages of both is that in most cases they can be recycled over and over again without losing any quality. Using recycled glass and metal helps reduce the amount of resources needed to produce these materials from scratch, also the process of recycling uses a lot less energy than what is required to make new glass and metal.

Textiles

Textile production can include processes like dying and bleaching which uses a lot of energy and will produce toxic gases which are then released into the environment not to mention the harmful pesticides that are often used whilst growing the raw materials. The main things to consider when choosing an eco friendly option is how renewable the product is, in other words, can it be replenished quickly, whether the product is dyed or if natural dyes are used, and whether a lot of chemicals are required to produce it. Some of the more eco friendly choices include organic cotton, wool and hemp although there are many others available too.

Furniture

How eco friendly your furniture is will depend on the material it is made from, how it is processed and what finishes have been used, so choose carefully. Consider buying second hand furniture or items made from recycled or reclaimed materials and doing them up as this helps to keep existing items in circulation and reduces the amount of perfectly useful items ending up in landfill.

When sourcing eco friendly materials for your interior design project, try to stick to the following guidelines:

- Buy from local producers and suppliers as much as possible as the less distance an item has to travel, the lower the impact on the environment

- Consider the type of materials you choose and whether they come from renewable and sustainable energy sources

- Avoid materials that contain chemical additives or that use a lot of energy during manufacturing processes

- When buying new items, try as much as possible to choose products that can be readily recycled after use or that can be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner

- Consider low energy or energy saving devices and buy as much as you can from recycled or reclaimed materials

Finally, as a result of the massive amount of publicity given to global warming and the need for conservation of energy, many producers make claims about their products that are misleading or even false so check out the credentials of any suppliers claiming that their products are certified as natural, organic or eco friendly.

David McEvoy is an expert in interior design. If you are looking for a leather sofa to give the finishing touches to a newly decorated room then please come and visit our site.

Article Source: http://www.articlegarden.com