apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Green things that we easily accomplished included: painting with Safecoat Zero VOC paints and Safecoat low VOC primer (walls and a few used pieces of furniture off of Craigslist); purchasing a 12 year old glider, a 1950s book shelf, and an antique dresser/changing table off of Craigslist; Swadlebees organic & hemp diapers, plus some used cloth off of Craigslist; as many organic cotton and secondhand outfits & blankets as possible; organic cotton sheets (bought fabric online, made by local seamstress);glass & Bisphenol free plastic bottles; multiple pieces of used furniture and the greenest crib we could find (Stokke). Unfortunatley, even though Stokke cribs are sustainably built, it is not very green to ship things across the ocean and we picked up some other very green unfriendly items, such as a prefab toy shelf at Target, plastic baby bathtub, and picture frames for artwork from Hobby Lobby, who I think imports everything from China. I would have loved to change out the carpet in the room for cork floor, but that would have resulted in wasting a perfectly good carpet and cost extra money.

There's a basic divide in Lara's nursery - everything she has that we've bought her is totally green. Almost everything else - presents, hand-me-downs, etc. - is pretty much not green. Eh, I think spending less money on unnecessary stuff is pretty green also, so we've been happy to take gifts and use them instead of whatever more green replacement product we would want in an ideal world.

My idea of green tends to be more about less consuming, more upcycling/recyling, and making do instead of having constant instant universal fulfillment/gratification. So we've stopped buying clothes (see others who do the same at http://nikkishell.typepad.com/wardroberefashion/) and we make toys and artwork.

going green for a kids room is easier in some aspects and harder in others. using hand me down furniture, organic sheets, used / organic clothes=easy...preventing 5000 plastic toys from being given to your children=hard....

We used American Pride paint and furnished it completely off of Freecycle and Craigslist except for window treatments. I did my best in encouraging people to give us second-hand or organic fiber gifts, but only a few did so. I haven't had any luck finding used glass bottles or my preferred carrier (Moby wrap) so I'll be buying those new. We did get a new infant car seat, but that was for safety reasons. We are really lucky in that we have friends who's littlest is 10 months old so they stocked us up with gently used cloth diapers.

I considered returning the new gifts and buying replacements off of Craigslist / thrift stores, but we are on a time-crunch and that is just time consuming.

We didn't paint and didn't initially buy new furniture (except crib and mattress) or art, which is pretty "green", I suppose. But I had second thoughts about used furniture when we discovered that the crib we had arranged to buy from craigslist had been recalled (the seller was mortified and chainsawed it into oblivion, but yikes). I had further second thoughts when the 100-year old dresser we got from my grandmother that we were using as a changing table had one leg snap right off without warning and toppled over, mere seconds after we'd picked up our son from a diaper change. Hello, Ikea Tassa dresser.

In general I remain confused by the idea that green is something you can buy; mostly I consider it to be things I don't buy and stuff I don't do. So: no baby bathtub, no crib linens other than a sheet, limited clothing and toy purchases, and so on, but then again, new crib and dresser as mentioned, plus disposable diapers (which I don't regret). I don't spend much time on questions like which paint is least volatile because the answer is: existing paint that dried a couple of years ago. Similarly most furniture questions seemed to boil down to (a) built by three-fingered Indonesian toddlers versus (b) out of old-growth forest from the Amazon versus (c) using volatile organic compounds versus (d) shipped halfway around the world. Gosh, it all sounds so good I don't know where to start!

We donated all the plastic toys we were given to our local children's museum, where they are much appreciated and used until they break; our thank you notes say only how much our son has enjoyed playing with them.

My brain is too pregnant to do break downs and calculations.