Minimize Waste When Beautifying Your Home

Low-Waste Ways You Can Upgrade Your Home

By Cora Gold

Many green-minded homeowners often think twice about updating their space because of waste. No matter how you slice it, home improvement projects produce debris, which may litter the environment. Fortunately, you can minimize your environmental impact by renovating your house in these six ways.

Spruce Up Your Landscaping

The beauty of maintaining your yard is it mainly generates organic waste. Organic waste is biodegradable and compostable. You can also turn green waste — grass clippings, dead leaves, branches, and bark — into mulch to suppress weed growth around your shrubbery and garden.

Working with a certified arborist helps your yard trees grow healthy. This professional can safely prune unwanted branches, remove dead trees, save dying ones, and plant new ones. Healthy trees with no hazardous limbs and branches are aesthetic assets to your house.

Revamp Architectural Accents

Accent colors are the true star of your house’s exterior design. While siding and roofing panels have more surface area, the front and garage doors should be the focal point. Making these features’ colors pop should increase your house’s curb appeal.

Thankfully, you can repaint wood, metal, and vinyl doors. However, you need more than proper equipment and some understanding of color theory.

There’s science behind paint jobs — your product should match the material and the weather should cooperate to achieve a beautiful finish. For example, choosing an acrylic latex paint over an oil-based one when dealing with a metal or wood door to dry faster and neutralize ultraviolet rays. Before proceeding, you should also check the weather forecast to anticipate two days of cool and dry conditions.

Reface Your Old Cabinets

Cabinet refacing allows you to give your kitchen a quick makeover without the cost and wastefulness of a full-blown replacement. This project involves replacing old cabinet doors and drawer fronts with something new and applying a matching veneer to all visible areas — such as the sides and the spaces around the doors.

The cabinet boxes remain in place, so there’s less debris and dust. You can also install a new hardware set. Metal hinges, handles, and pulls are reusable and recyclable. You can donate or keep them for future projects.

This project is a budget-friendly way to match your cabinetry to your new countertops. Cabinet refacing doesn’t generally require a building permit, nor do you need to hire a licensed contractor. If you’re happy with your kitchen’s or bathroom’s layout and confident in your woodworking skills, you can take this route without help.

Modernize Plumbing Fixtures

Swapping your old faucets and showerheads for their water-saving counterparts can conserve 700 gallons of water yearly and give your space a facelift. Modern plumbing fixtures can deliver adequate flow rates at low water pressure for typical uses.

Although hiring a professional plumber is generally advisable, DIYers can install new faucets and showerheads. Since this project doesn’t involve touching the pipework, removing your perfect floors and pulling a permit is unnecessary.

Revitalize Wood Flooring

Refinishing your hardwood or engineering wood floors can remedy your past cleaning mistakes or reverse signs of aging. It only involves stain, varnish, and seal removal. All flooring components stay where they are, so this project produces little waste, plus the cleanup should be painless.

However, consider hiring a flooring contractor to complete the job correctly the first time. Although this task seems simple, you risk sanding your floors too thin and permanently ruining surfaces. To avoid lumber waste, spend extra to prevent turning a refinishing job into a resurfacing project.

Switch to Energy-Efficient Appliances

Upgrading to the latest appliances does more than lowering your energy bills and reducing your carbon footprint. This initiative can also reinvigorate your space’s aesthetics.

Moreover, replacing your outdated appliances doesn’t have to congest landfills. The United States government has acknowledged the importance of the circular economy in curbing various environmental ills, including climate change, pollution, and natural resource depletion. Finding local takers interested in reusing, repairing, refurbishing, remanufacturing, or recycling your old appliances is easier than ever.

However, switching from fossil fuel to electric is sometimes more complex. Electric appliances can be bulkier than their natural gas, propane, or oil counterparts. If you have little room, you may have to remodel your space slightly to accommodate more eco-friendly but wider machines, which generate more debris.