It's not easy to be environmentally friendly all the time, but it turns out there are lots of things a mindful cottage or vacation property owner can do to not only fully enjoy a cottage or property but also preserve it for future generations to enjoy.
Greening Your Cottage or Vacation Property offers ways to save energy, reduce waste, and make your cottage or vacation property a more sustainable place for you and your friends and family, as stewards of the buildings and the land. Authors and long-time cottage owners and environmentalists, mother and daughter team Joan and Tracy Bartley, show us how their family ' and now yours ' can not only vacation in an environmentally friendly way, but turn time away into a teaching experience.
A cottage or vacation property is the perfect place to begin to live a more sustainable, eco-friendly lifestyle. Whether your cottage is of new construction, or older and in need of renovations, opportunities abound to reduce, reuse, recycle, and restore with the practical, affordable, and insightful advice in this book.
The download kit includes:
Cottage Greening Action Plan template
Progress Monitoring Checklist
Resources for further research and reading
Closing the Cottage for Winter Checklist
' And much more!
Introduction xi 1 Getting Started: Crafting Your Vision Statement 1 1. Defining Greening and Sustainability 2 2. Setting Your Greening Goal 2 3. Exploring and Visioning: What Lifestyle and Environmental Values Define Your Ultimate Cottage Experience? 3 4. Get to Work Straightaway: What Can You Do Now? 6 5. Crafting Your Cottage Greening Vision Statement 7 2 Taking Stock Inside and Out 11 1. Taking Stock 12 1.1 Categories for taking stock 13 1.2 Taking stock checklist 14 iv Greening Your Cottage or Vacation Property 2. Four Rs and Beyond 18 2.1 Common greening practices 19 2.2 Common greening practices and furnishing your cottage 27 3. What's Next? A Practical Project 28 3.1 Painting, inside and out 30 3.2 Composting 31 3.3 Homemade cleaning products 32 3.4 Reduce recyclables 33 3.5 Chemical-free pest control 36 4. Now That You've Taken Stock and Started a Practical Project, What's Next? 39 3 Becoming Environmentally Savvy 41 1. Living an Environmentally Sustainable Lifestyle Is Not New 42 2. What Do You Need to Know about Greening at the Cottage? 43 3. Learning and Greening 44 3.1 Nature's classroom for tomorrow's stewards 45 3.2 Learning and practicing stewardship with the kids 47 3.3 Simple rainwater catchments 48 3.4 Exploring the forest, or woods 50 3.5 Learning and conserving 50 4. Deepening Understanding and Improving Your Greening Lifestyle 54 4 Making a Commitment: A Cottage Greening Action Plan 57 1. Steps to Creating a Cottage Greening Action Plan 58 1.1 Your Cottage Greening Action Plan 58 2. Sharing Your Commitment 62 2.1 Green gifting 63 Contents v 5 Putting Your Cottage Greening Action Plan into Action 69 1. Our Action Plan in Action 70 2. Your Cottage Greening Action Plan in Action 73 2.1 Substantive greening actions 74 3. Reflections: Where Are We Now? 82 4. One Step at a Time towards a Sustainable Lifestyle 83 Sources and Resources 85 Books and Articles 85 Children's Literature 86 Websites 87 Visioning, Mind Mapping, and Mission Statements 87 Environmental Sites 87 Download Kit 89 Checklists 1 Taking Stock Checklist 15 2 Monitoring Progress of a Project 62 Example 1 A Cottage Greening Vision Statement 9 Exercise 1 Cottage Greening Action Plan 60
