Total home makeover!!!

I would have loved to include some before shots, because it really is hard to believe what a difference painting the trim has made to our home!!  Before the trim was a pale yellow (like on the plaque with our #).  Nathanael has put in countless hours over his spring break fixing up our home- and we've been really blessed with FANTASTIC weather so it's worked out well, in fact Nathanael is still outside now finishing up different parts of the trim!  Because we painted the trim in a dark colour (Benjamin Moores' Low VOC exterior paint bittersweet chocolate) it makes the white stucco of our house look much brighter- in fact many of our neighbours asked us if we repainted the stucco...  Our home now reminds us of a tudor house!

Green personal care products

Thanks to a request from my friend Kate, here are some pointers and a list of personal care products we use.

Unfortunately personal care product regulation is not nearly as strict as it is for food labeling, so pretty well much everyone and their uncle can use the word organic on a personal care item without it necessarily being true.

If you are are unsure about what products to use you can check out the safety of different items on the Environmental working group's skin deep database.  http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/

This was really helpful for me, because we used to use Avalon Organics hair products and were super surprised to find on the database some of their products rated 6/10 (0 = no toxicity!!) All that while throwing around the word organic!!

For our soap (for the whole family) we use Val's Veggie soap which has 3 ingredients I believe and is made from olive oil.  I even used this as shampoo for a long time and it worked fine!  What is great about bar soap is that you save on all that plastic packaging!! There are other good soap companies out there too- just avoid fragrance (contains hormone disrupting pthalates), parabens (another nasty plastic ingredient used as a preservative).  Basically if you can't pronounce the ingredients....

For handsoap we use Natureclean 100% natural hand soap.  The mint one smells really good.

For our shampoo, we either use the bar soap or we were VERY happy to see that a canadian company green beaver now has certified organic shampoo and conditioner.  Check out their website http://www.greenbeaver.com/  We get ours from superstore (Loblaws)

For our toothpaste we do use a floride based toothpaste once a day and a non-fluoride based toothpaste for the other brush (so far no complaints from the dentist- been about 3 years of this!).
We use a green beaver toothpaste (fluoride free) and Ecodent for the floride and sensitive tooth (rescueDent) toothpaste (Nat has sensitive teeth)- this is way more natural than sensodyne (which is bright green incidentally).

For our deodorant this was a whole journey!!!  To be honest I tried a tons of natural deodorants (aluminum free) and none of them worked well, I was pretty smelly for about a year.  That was until I found soapwalla deodorant cream which works AWESOME for both Nat and me!!  The only days I get a little BO is when I forget to use it!!!  The other thing I love about it is that I can recycle the little tub (not a ton of plastic parts that can't be recycled).  http://www.soapwallakitchen.com/  We order ours through an online store (that is close by so I can pick it up!)  it is fairly expensive but totally worth it and lasts a longtime.

For makeup there are some really great options- I go for the cheaper stuff right now (Physician's formula certified organic line) and I'm not thrilled with the quality, but when our debts will be paid I will most likely upgrade!  They have a decent tinted moisturizer.

We use soap instead of shaving cream, we use a little of our organic shampoo instead of bubble bath (a couple squirts under the running water does the trick).

I actually use a little baking soda every day as a gentle natural exfoliator for my face.  It works really well. I have a little bit in a little tub and use it in the shower. This is much cheaper and healthier alternative to many face washes!

Hopefully this helps and challenges some of you to pitch your toxic skincare products!!!

Glacier

Here is a picture of Nat, Benjamin and Luc and Jacqueline in front of the receeding Glacier in Jasper National Park, Alberta.

Our boys/Nos garçons

For about a year and a half, Benjamin has been extremely passionate about marbles...  Here he is at the Vancouver Aquarium showing off one such treasure.  Depuis 1 an et demi Benjamin est passionné de billes...  Le voici en montrant un de ses trésors.

On est fier de Josué car il a été choisi pour participer dans 2 cérémonies de mariage cette année.  Il portait les bagues.  We are proud of our handsome Josué who was a ring bearer twice this summer!

Having Principles... a real cure to consumerism

Over the past few years as our family has been on this journey of becoming green, we have developed some serious principles....

And once these principles are in place and we stick to them, they are actually really good for our pocketbook- it is very hard to find things we can actually buy!

Here are some of the principles we've developed- a lot of them with the help of Adria Vasil's ecoholic- A fantastic read!!

1) Cotton is one of the plants that, if it's not grown organically, requires the most pesticides.  So for clothing we have a couple of choices:  organic cotton clothing or clothes made out of wool or recycled materials.

2) If we can't be certain the clothes being sold weren't made by children or people treated and paid poorly we don't buy them.

3) As much as possible we avoid plastic all together-  it has a limited capacity for being recycled, keeps putting the demand on the crazy oil and refining industry and eventually could end up taking 2000 years to biodegrade....  personally I would like my life not to leave a plastic legacy.

4) One can be proud of Canada for our lack of pollution, but if we are sourcing all our goods to China, then it is quite normal for them to have more air quality issues etc. than we do!  So as much as possible we try to buy products made in Canada, Europe where we hope the production, environmental standards are high ( you may or may not agree with me on this one- but in other words we tend to avoid made in China)

So all of these principles make walking through the mall relatively temptation free!!!  Here's an example:  H&M has some organic cotton clothing, but I won't buy from them because I can't be assured of good working conditions for the makers of their clothes!

Here are some stores we can buy from in good conscience:

Mountain Equipment Co-op (they have organic cotton and recycled polyester clothing and the labour conditions are verified by a 3rd party)
Hemp & Co  (on Vancouver Island) clothes made from organic cotton, hemp etc.  lots made in Canada.
American Apparel has some organic cotton clothing and everything is made in the USA

But the greenest store of all:  ANY thrift store!!!  So many things that aren't yet available in earth friendly materials we can buy from a thrift store and at least not be encouraging that industry - we are not in the supply and demand loop!

Hope you find this challenging and interesting!

Catherine

Green Kitchen Part 1

This past spring Nat and I got to the bottom of a leak in our kitchen.  It had been leaking for a long long time and so it rotted out our wall, floor and part of our cabinets...  Although no one jumps for joy at news of a leak (and the impending money that gets used fixing it!) we used the opportunity to do as green of a kitchen reno as we could.

The leak was coming from a plumbing vent cap that cracked, every time it rained water was trickling down along the pipe.

We did some good hard thinking and thought about the following things:

1) What will be good quality and look good (which will help with resale)?
2) What will return to nature (or biodegrade) when we are done with it (or when the next owners want to redo the kitchen again!)?
3) What will have low or no VOCs and give us good air quality in our home?

With these things in mind we decided to go as plastic-free as possible...

Here's what we decided on:

Floor:  Plain ceramic tile from Home Depot  (there was a recycled variety available a Rona but only in 2 colours, so we didn't go with it).  No VOC grout from a tile store.

Cabinets:  Solid wood and Plywood cabinets made from a local company:  Maple Ridge Woodcraft.  This meant no chipboard held together with glues that can offgas.

Countertop:  Ice stone- recycled glass and concrete surface.

Lighting:  6 potlights- LEDs with dimmers.  This thanks to our friend and Neighbour Peter- what a blessing!

Paint:  Benjamin Moore's Natura no Voc blue paint and Yolo Paints No voc cream paint.

Backsplash:  Hand-picked of the beach pebble sticks from Mosaic Stoneworks- where the owner assured us the workers were treated decently and paid decently too (we don't have 3rd party certification for this one- but the owner has been to see the conditions himself so we are trusting him on it!)

We were really blessed to have 2 of our neighbours help out: Peter & Ken.  Nat is really a lot handier after this experience!  We also redid our bathroom but I'll blog more about that later!

It was an expensive reno because we decided not to do a quick fix, but by January it will be mostly paid off!  So we have no regrets about the choices we made!    Here are some pictures!

Long time no blog...

It has been a really really long time (since March), but I forsee some time over the next few weeks to do some blogging especially about becoming Green!

Since March we have done a green kitchen reno (will post pictures) and we have equally lots more of regular life to post about like our trip to Ottawa and to the Rockies...

Not to mention I decided to homeschool Josué this year, so there is lots to say about that! 

And, once I am blogging from Nat's computer I can upload some pictures of the boys too.  Looking forward to getting back into this ;)

Catherine