Kelly Hart – Page 223 – Natural Building Blog

Here’s a book hot off the press! It is always exciting to have the actual book in my hand and see the real manifestation of all those days of work. Remodel Green: Make Your House Serve Your Life is the second book in my series about green home building (the first was Rolling Shelter: Vehicles We Have Called Home) and it chronicles much of the personal remodeling I have done over my life.

I organized the chapters to focus on specific aspects of green remodeling, using examples from my experience to illustrate the points I make. The book is lavishly illustrated with photos from all of those projects, so it is a fun book to browse. My dear friend, Lee Temple from www.PrimaMundi.com, wrote a fine Foreword for the book, placing its message in the greater context of global environmental awareness. To remodel an existing structure to suit your needs is fundamentally a sustainable activity, because it means that you are salvaging a considerable amount of embodied energy rather than causing all of the new embodied energy that any new building would entail.

We have just published a book about my and my wife Zana’s experiences, over four decades, of living in a variety of vehicular based homes. In fact when we first met I was living in a school bus I had converted to a quaint home that was parked near the mouth of the Russian River on the Pacific Coast. It was a romantic time holding many fond memories.

Rolling Shelter: Vehicles We Have Called Home is the first of a series of several books about all of the building that I have done over these many years. The others will be about remodeling existing homes and about earthbag building. The general theme of all of these books is how to provide shelter in an ecological and economical way, and I am using my own experience as an example for this.