Celebrate Green Blog

by Corey

I’m so excited to begin this series.

Of all the projects we’ve begun and of all the (many!) projects we have planned, none is more important to me than our floors.

In my opinion, floors do more than ensure that your kids don’t fall through to the crawl space below. They do more than provide a surface for your furniture and feet.

Floors define the mood and tone of your home and the rooms within. They provide an experience of comfort (or discomfort, as the case may be). And they impact the health of your whole family (often for worse).

The house we purchased came with brand-spanking new, cream-colored carpet. Wall-to-wall (even in the master bathroom!), except for the wood entryway, and laminate kitchen, guest bathroom and laundry-room.

We don’t do carpet. Personally, I don’t like the way it feels on my feet. But more importantly, I don’t like the way it inflames my daughter’s asthma. Many carpets (and the padding/glues underneath) also contain chemicals that off-gas into the home, long after installation. Carpet traps dust, dirt, and everything else that’s tracked into the home on shoes, pets paws, and whatever else. And don’t even get me started on carpet cleaners. For all these reasons and more, we decided to remove the carpets and replace them with new flooring. (See how we “recycled” the old carpet here.)

But what would we replace the carpet with?

Now, I’m a proud tree hugger. So the thought of filling my home with wood floors cut from virgin trees shipped across the globe was just too much to bear. Sure, I could have purchased click-in $1.99/sq foot planks from the discount place down the street, but this savings just wasn’t worth it (sorry, Honey). I just couldn’t justify the actual “price” of using non-sustainably harvested wood to make my home beautiful, even if it meant my home would also be healthier (than with carpet). There had to be a better way.

Fortunately, there are many better ways. Cork, Marmoleum, bamboo, concrete, stone and recycled-tile are all great alternatives.

But for our laid-back, country-style home, we decided that wood was our number one choice. (We did go with tile in the bathroom and Marmoleum in the laundry room - stay tuned for a forthcoming post on this topic), but what type?

Our choices were numerous. Virgin wood floors from overseas? From the US? Laminate? Bamboo that looks like wood? Or how about FSC-certified wood floors (getting closer).

None was the right fit.

Enter Goodwin Heart Pine.

Goodwin floors are antique, U.S. river-recovered and reclaimed (re-purposed from barns and buildings being torn down). No trees killed, no shipping them from across the planet. They have history (the knots, nail-holes and color variations each tell a story), they’re breathtakingly beautiful, and they’re as sustainable as wood floors come. Here are some images: (Be prepared to drool.)

Goodwin Heart Pine owners, Carol and Dave Goodwin, are a husband-wife team and two of the nicest people in the world. Not only are they cool peeps, they’re gurus of their trade, advocates for the environment and passionate about the preservation of the art and history of the wood flooring install/finishing industry. They’re the kind of people you’d hope to have for neighbors, or wish would share the same last name. They’re the kind of people you’d feel good about buying something as important as your floors from.

In upcoming posts, we’ll dive into how Goodwin floors are recovered, how ours made it from river/old building to where my feet now rest, how we decided to scrape them (rather than sand), how we finished them (hint: a floor’s finish is just as important as the flooring itself, if not more so, when it comes to the health of your family), and how the entire process turned out to be - well, not quite what we expected.

In the meantime, check out this great article on George Goodwin (and how Goodwin Heart Pine came to be) as well as this TV segment (below) featuring the Goodwin story:

(Stay tuned for “Corey’s Green Home Project: The Floors Part #2, coming up soon…)

What type of flooring is in your home? What do you love about your floors? What would you change if you could?

Follow Corey’s journey to updating her home with the health of the planet, her family and wallet in mind. Stay tuned for more of Corey’s Green Home Project. (Missed previous posts? Click here.)

Lynn Colwell and Corey Colwell-Lipson are mother and daughter and authors of Celebrate Green! Creating Eco-Savvy Holidays, Celebrations and Traditions for the Whole Family, and founders of Green Halloween®.