Home & Garden...

There are professionals you can hire to run a green home and yard audit for you. If you have a complex home situation, a pro can help. That said, most of us can easily run our own green audits with a few basic tips.

Today let's look at what exactly a green home audit is. Basically a green audit is a study, or examination of a specific area. For instance, you can study your bathroom, see what is and what is not green about the bathroom, and then make decisions to improve the greenness of the bathroom. You can audit your home in its entirety, audit room by room, and even audit a single pantry. You can also audit a commercial setting, school, or other area.

Green audits are never the same, because your home is unique to others. This is a good thing because you can audit for specific green qualities if you choose. For example, you may want to do an energy audit, or a water use audit, or an all over general, "How green is my home" audit.

The first thing you'll want to do is choose how much you'd like to audit. If you only want to audit your kitchen that's cool, or maybe your goal is to slowly audit your entire house. The key is to take it slow. A pro may be able to do an entire audit in a day, but if you do it yourself you'll want to go slow so you don't miss anything. You may also need to get outside help for certain issues, say, lighting concepts and designs.

Tomorrow we'll start looking at how you can run a basic green audit on specific rooms.