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Cork flooring – beautiful and an eco-friendly choice for your home

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Are you thinking about replacing the flooring in your home? Perhaps tearing out your wall to wall carpeting and putting down a beautiful wooden floor?

That certainly seems to be the trend these days. I can even say that my own home has no carpeted floors. We tore them out when we first moved in because we both have allergies to dust mites, cats and dogs and the former home owners had had a cat. We were also lucky enough to discover that the flooring beneath the carpeting was in fairly good shape and only needed a little bit of work in order to regain it’s former beauty.

If we’d found that we had to replace the current flooring we might have chosen to go with cork. I’ve actually thought of replacing the not so nice looking laminated fake wood flooring that’s in our kitchen with cork flooring.

Have you ever thought of using cork flooring? It’s durable and comes in many different styles and colors from natural honey tones to red, green, chocolate, black and many other shades. Have a look at three different types I’ve selected to show you:

bamboo-natural_hb.jpg stone-cream_hb.jpg mediterranean.jpg

The first image is a natural bamboo style cork flooring, while the second cork flooring image is called Stone Cream (both by Valencia) and it almost looks like marble doesn’t it? The last image is called Mediterranean (by DaVinci) and it has a rich red tone to it.

You could easily purchase a style and color of Cork Flooring to suit any room in your home.

As someone who tries to live green the idea of using an easily renewable product such as cork flooring in my home is appealing.

When cork is collected for use in the creation of flooring and other products no trees are cut down. No. Instead, the bark is peeled from parts of the tree without harming the tree at all. New bark grows back within nine to ten years and is ready to be harvested once again.

See how environmentally friendly cork flooring really is? No trees are cut down or harmed at all. The fact that the trees remain in place and standing likely means that the delicate eco-systems that live in an around the trees probably have very little disruption.

Floormall.com carries several cork flooring lines made by some of the top manufactures in the business. Valencia, Da Vinci, Natural Cork, Wicanders, and APC cork floors are featured cork flooring manufacturers at the Floormall.com. I believe the majority of the cork flooring styles sold at the Floormall.com website are glue-less joint systems, which means they should be easy to install in your home.

If cork flooring sounds like it might be a great choice for your home visit the floormall.com. You can talk to a live service representative 7 days a week/ 24 hours a day if you have questions.






Do you think Live Earth will make a difference?

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There’s an interesting conversation going on about the Live Earth concert at Go Smell the Flowers.

The blog author asks the question:

Live earth is kicking off around the world today with performance in all 7 continents with over 10,000 events promised globally. Will it really help? Are we too late or no need for concern?

There’s been quite a few replies to that post. Some people are being quite pessimistic stating that whatever we do now won’t make a difference and that the message of the concert won’t really get through to many people. Others are more optimistic stating the changes they’ve made in their own lives towards becoming more green and how every little bit will help.

What do you think?

Do you believe global warming exists?

Whether you believe in global warming or not, do you think that if we all made a few changes in our lives it might help the environment or that it might really be a better way to live?

Chris and I aren’t totally green, but we’ve made a lot of changes in our lives over the years toward living green.

Here’s just a few of the things that we do:

  1. Almost all of our lights are energy efficient, as are our appliances.
  2. We turn the heat down in the winter
  3. We live a few blocks from work so we walk to work
  4. Our car is a 4 cyl and because we live so close to work and many small shops we really only use our car once a week or so for short trips to get groceries etc.
  5. We have a few small trees in our yard
  6. Not all of our plants are drought resistant but many are so I don’t have to water a lot
  7. We grow many of our own veggies and fruit
  8. Our garden is organic
  9. What we do purchase in the grocery store is local whenever possible
  10. We don’t eat much meat
  11. We rarely eat processed foods,
  12. We recycle and use recycled products if they are available
  13. We dry many of our clothes on the line instead of using the dryer
  14. We bring our own reusable bags to the grocery store.
  15. We try to use eco-friendly products whenever possible ie no harsh cleaning chemicals etc.

Do you do any of these things? Perhaps you have some more ideas on how to live green for those who read this site?

Learn about going green at GreenOptions.com

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I have just visited a website that I think, and hope, many of my readers will find useful. The site is called Green Options: Greening the Good Life. For a newly launched website it certainly has a lot of great information and features. I think this new site has been well planned and should see a lot of success in the near future.

One reason why I like this site is that I attempt to go Green whenever possible. By this I mean I try to cut down on my usage of electricity by using energy saving compact florescent bulbs, I compost our food scraps, fertilize and care for my lawn and garden using natural means, recycle, purchase items made from “renewed” materials, and among many other things that my husband and I do to stay green we also live close enough to work that we can walk, thus doing our part to cut down on air pollution and save gas.

I’m always looking for new ways to help the environment and of course to save some money while doing so, and I think this new site – Greenoptions.com will go a long way towards helping me in my goals.

When you go to the site you will first visit the main page which lists the various features of the site – blog, forums, the Green Life Guide, and the Green Report. You’ll also see some featured recent articles.

When I visited the blog I discovered that it is written by several authors, and that there appears to be a number of well written articles each day. Topics such as Alternate fuel vehicles, energy, climate change, renewable power, home and garden, conservation plus many more topics including a “tip of the day” are covered. After reading just a few of the articles in the blog I feel that I can learn quite a bit about “going green”, and learned that there is a lot more that I could be doing to protect the environment.

The forums appear to be newer than the blog, and does not have a lot of members as of yet. However, I can see the forum as a great place to discuss what’s going on in the world in relation to “Green” topics, and to meet other like minded individuals.

The Green Life Guide appears to contain articles that will inform you about ways in which you can practice green living and affect change in the world by learning about environmental organizations. Where as the Green Report appears to be a collection of news articles from around the world related to the environment and what the world’s leaders are doing about climate change and pollution.

All in all I really like this new site. It’s user friendly and very informative. If you are new to being “Green” I would suggest beginning at the blog and working your way through the various site features from there.

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