Reply #20: What we do now:

[youthere]

CFL Bulbs

compost our food scraps-or feed to the chickens (who are so appreciative they reward us with lovely eggs)

recycle...in fact, we just remodeled our kitchen and built in a terrific recycling center

collect rain water for the garden, houseplants and also for the rabbits and chickens

We use cloth towels for cleaning rather than paper towels..I keep a bucket in the laundry room full of soapy water, and we just throw them in there until I'm ready to wash a load.

Ditto on the napkins. I bought a "mega pack" of cheap washcloths that we use as dinner napkins. I have some nicer ones for special occasions, but for every day the washcloths work perfectly. I made sure they are a different color than the washcloths we use for showering, so we could keep them straight.

I make my own cleaning products whenever possible-lemon, vinegar, baking soda, ammonia or bleach pretty much covers the gamut.

Ditto on the beauty products..witch hazel, vitamin e, chamomile tea,hyrden peroxide and/or tea tree oil will pretty much solve any skin issue.

We use a front loading washer and hang out clothes to dry, either outside or in the basement-we strung up several lines a couple years back, since my washer and dryer were always down there. Since then we've remodeled and moved the laundry room upstairs so I really would like to put up one of those retractable clotheslines.

We use an outdoor woodburner in the winter. We have a lot of timber in our area so there's a great deal of dead wood to harvest. The woodburner heats water that runs into the house via underground lines (and also through our water heater so we always have plenty of that!) and into a heat exchanger on the furnace. We are planning on adding a corn or pellet burner to the furnace as well, but that will be down the road somewhere. The wood really saves us though. The first year we lived here (we moved here in February) we went through FOUR full tanks of propane (we're talking feb-april and that's with the heat set at 62). That summer we replaced all the windows and doors and the next winter we went through two tanks of propane all winter. The next year we put in our woodstove and now we do a minimum fill (250 gallons) every third year or so.

Everything we eat we grow ourselves or buy from local producers.

Several years ago we replaced all the doors and windows in the house with energy efficient ones. They helped a lot, but we still get drafts (it's an old house) so I sewed these thick roll down shades for all the windows out of an old comforter I found at goodwill. They attach/detach easily, so we put them up every winter to cut down on drafts. We keep them on the south facing windows year-round because it helps the cooling as well if we can block some of the heat beating in.
We planted deciduous trees along the south side as well...they aren't large enough to help with shade in the summer, but hopefully in a couple of year they will be mature enough to do some good. In fact we planted a bunch of trees around the yard..once mature, they should help immensely with cooling costs. The evergreens we planted as a windbreak are just now large enough to block a lot of the wind and snow we get.

And we are also canvas-bag shoppers.

We'd really like to eventually add that pellet stove, and also some solar panels to the house. We've talked about putting up a small windmill too because wind we got a lot of!