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A healthy green home is an eco-friendly "sanctuary" that comforts, protects, and enhances the lives of its inhabitants.

If you are lucky enough to have a say in your home's construction, you have a great opportunity to build with an eco-groovy, non-toxic, and completely natural approach. Prescriptions for A Healthy House by Paula Baker-Laporte, Erica Elliot, and John Banta is a very good healthy home resource, as is the Bau-Biologie website.

Here is a video of some very cool homes- "earthships"- for inspiration. I think it is fascinating to see all the cutting edge ways you can live green.

If you are like me and most other people, though, and you live in a house built before using green principles was in vogue, then you need to understand that most homes are constructed with the use of numerous unhealthy materials and chemicals.

On top of this, most people fill their homes with items that are potentially toxic either to themselves or to the environment, so it's not hard to understand that many homes can detract from, rather than enhance, your health and the quality of your life.

So what should you do? Don't worry- there are lots of simple steps you can take to create a healthy green home.

Go to Energy Efficient Home Design to learn more about how you can save resources and money by making your home more energy efficient.

Go to Tips For Living Green to find out about additional things you can do at home to help save our planet.

If it fits your budget, you can also look into a a healthy green home renovation. There is a wide selection of natural home building materials in the marketplace today, and it's becoming easier and easier to find experts familiar with working with these materials.

Bamboo flooring, for example, is lovely and very eco-friendly. Bamboo Inspiration provides resources and guides on bamboo flooring and other home products such as furniture.

If you don't want to use new materials in your renovation, think about using recycled items. Friends and family, estate sales, auctions, antique stores, yard sales, craigslist, and freecycle.org can all be sources of high quality used/recycled goods.

When we moved into our home a few years ago and made the decision to re-do our kitchen, we found a great company called Green Demolitions. They sell gently used, very high quality items and we were able to buy all of our cabinets, countertops, and most of our appliances from them.

Installing everything was a bit of an adventure for our contractor (because the kitchen we purchased was custom-made for a different house), but we got a great deal, and now we have not just a beautiful kitchen, but a recycled kitchen that makes us feel good about living green.

For more info about how to eco green living at home, I recommend picking up Natural Home Magazine- it's a terrific resource for more tips for living green.