How to build an eco-friendly home

Green building is a worldwide trend. Everyone wants a safe home for themselves and their children. Our site of tips decided to study what materials an eco-house can be built from today, what is best used for external and internal decoration, than furnish and decorate.

The first thing to start with building an environmentally friendly home is choosing a location. In the middle of a metropolis, all efforts to make a home safe for humans and nature will look, to put it mildly, unconvincing. The best option is a land plot next to a water body or a forest, in a place where a person has not yet had time to completely change the relief. We agree that even fans of eco-style don’t want to live somewhere on the outskirts, far from the supermarket, clinic and other benefits of civilization.

A good option can be a cottage village in a convenient location from the point of view of transport interchange and at the same time far from high-voltage transmission lines, busy mainlines, factories, factories and other industrial facilities that pollute the atmosphere. It will not be superfluous to make sure of the ecological purity of the local river, beach, soil. Take your place of home seriously!

The most environmentally friendly is the pile foundation, which least of all affects the surrounding landscape. However, piles are not suitable for every home and soil type. You can use a pile-grillage foundation, which is built from concrete with reinforcement, sand, roofing felt and extruded polystyrene foam. But it is also not for all types of soil. A monolithic slab is suitable, which is used on any soil and under any type of house.

As for the material for the walls, the most environmentally friendly will be straw houses and clay, which the portal wrote about in detail. But such buildings, we admit, are exotic. Therefore, options such as ceramic bricks and foam concrete are more often used, including aerated concrete, polystyrene concrete (eco-concrete), which experts call the safest for the inhabitants..

We started with environmentally friendly blocks, materials for a stone house. But, of course, they did not forget about wood! Houses made of pine, larch and spruce are valued by their owners precisely for the natural origin of the wall material and beauty. It is best to opt for a rounded log.

As for the floors, wood and monolithic slabs are used..

For the exterior decoration of the house, we advise you to choose such ecological materials as:

• block house;
• lining and euro lining;
• clinker, clinker tiles;
• ceramic facing brick.

Expanded clay is ideal for insulating an eco house, but it is loose and is rarely used on the facade, much more often for filling the attic. For the facade, use basalt insulation, mineral wool.

The roof of an environmentally friendly house is not necessarily reed. Copper roofs are the most durable, but also the most expensive. As well as shale. Therefore, coatings such as ceramic and sand-concrete tiles are more often used..

Experts advise making the floor in an environmentally friendly house from cork, floorboards, parquet, ceramic tiles.

Important! Natural stone – marble and granite – may contain radon, a decay product of radium. It all depends on the deposit, you need to check the materials for the indicator of radioactivity.

We have already written about eco-materials for interior, decorative finishing of the house. Let’s repeat a little:

• if wallpaper – then reed, jute, rattan, bamboo, plain paper;
• paint – water-based;
• clay and mineral based plaster;
• ceramic tiles as an ideal option for decorating a bathroom, washroom and kitchen apron;
• natural stains, linseed oil for treating wooden surfaces.

The furniture in the eco-house is made of natural wood. You can choose a noble classic style. You can have a simple rustic. Wicker options are suitable, and upholstered furniture should be with safe filling and upholstery.

Textiles – linen, cotton, bamboo curtains are in fashion now.

As you can see, the choice of environmentally friendly materials is very large, it is possible to build a house that is completely safe for residents. However, to make the eco-house really friendly to nature, do not forget about solar panels, your own well and a recycling system, disposal of human waste.