How to Create an Eco-Friendly Playroom

When you're concerned about the environment, it's important to think green when designing and decorating your home in order to minimize your global footprint. Follow these steps to create an eco-friendly playroom that both you and your kids will enjoy.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Use natural, earth-friendly materials, such as cotton and linen fabrics and rugs. Cotton and linen are resistant to mildew, making them good materials to use around children who often have fragile immune systems and can have reactions to chemicals, dust and mold. Natural fibers are also more durable than synthetic materials.
2. Install a cork floor, which you can buy in tiles or planks that are a breeze to install. Cork is hypoallergenic, provides a soft surface on which kids can play, resists moisture, and is low-static, making it difficult for pet hair and dust to collect on it.
3. Purchase low-VOC paints that are water-based to use on the walls. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are chemicals emitted as gases from certain liquids and solids.
4. Invest in wooden furniture instead of plastic, and purchase new wood furniture from businesses that guarantee the wood is certified sustainable.
5. Give the eco-friendly playroom a touch of whimsy by furnishing it with reused objects. Head to an architectural salvage store and purchase some dressers, bookshelves and wooden containers in which to store your children's toys. If the paint is chipped, ensure that you paint over it with water-based paint to prevent young children from picking off paint chips and eating them.
6. Buy florescent light bulbs, instead of energy-inefficient halogen bulbs to place in the playroom's lamps and lighting fixtures.
7. Place safe plants around the eco-friendly playroom to bring some of the outdoors inside.
8. Hang recycled rubber boards on the walls of the playroom so your children can hang their art projects on them.

Tips & Warnings

• To create a wooden kid-sized table, simply saw a couple of inches off the legs of an adult-sized table.

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