Where have I gone to

Some of you may have wondered where I have gone; well, the answer is: deep into kitchen renovation. About a month ago now our plumbing gave under the sink leaving a flood in my kitchen and we decided to take this opportunity to renovate instead of just patching up a kitchen that was already in shambles.

My mom and dad are down from NB helping (thank you so much). 3 weeks into the reno, my dad is now working on getting the floor ready for my new cork floor. The walls are up and painted; same goes for the ceiling.

I wish we could have done the full kitchen eco-friendly but cost restriction and timing prohibited us from doing so. However I did consider the enviroment at many points in the kitchen reno; below are some of the decisions that we made that are in part green.

1. Cork Floor: When cork is harvested the tree is not destroyed and then replanted but rather the bark is trimmed from the tree every 9 years, leaving the tree and the forest undamaged. Its not unusual to have a 200 year old tree still producing cork bark. Cork flooring is actually made from the waste of the cork wine stopper manufacturing process so cork flooring is a recycled product.
2. Sico Go Prime Duo 100% Acrylic Latex Primer- Sealer and Undercoat: This is a great all purpose primer with less then 78.38g/L of VOC's. I knwo there are some primers out there that have 0g/L VOC however we had some primer left over from a previous project and in our time restraints could not get our hands on anything that had a lower VOC count.
   
3. Sico Paint Chamois: This is a 0g/L VOC paint; however the tint does add some VOC, the darker your paint the more VOC in it. Once again I know more eco-friendly options exist but we had all the paint we needed left over from previous projects.
   
4. I would have loved to get a LED light fixture for the kitchen but the up front cost is too much for us; instead we got a light fixture that could accomodate a compact florecent bulb. When chosing your light fixture make sure to always double check that a compact fluorescent bulb will fit, they are bigger then their incandescent conterparts.
   
5. We are reusing our existing cabinet pulls. We don't have enough to do the full kitchen so the uppers will have the old pulls reused and the lowers are going to have new pulls giving the kitchen a unique fun look.
6. An Ikea kitchen we chose Ikea for a few reasons first they are inexpensive secondly they do have a good enviromental practice. Ikea is not perfect but they do try harder then many companies out there to find out more check out : http://www.theikeaway.ca/en/home.html.

I found a great website with information on non-toxic painting if anyone is interested:
http://www.eartheasy.com/live_nontoxic_paints.htm#2d