Giveaway this week — “Green Interior Design” by Lori Dennis

We CSI girls love to decorate our homes and we are very excited about the giveaway this week from the fabulous Lori Dennis!

Lori’s work has been featured in the New York Times, People, House Beautiful, Coastal Living, Southern Accents, Woman’s Day, Los Angeles Times, Dwell and countless other magazines, books and websites throughout the world.

Lori proves that you can help the environment and still embrace style. “Green Interior Design”is filled with one hundred beautiful color photographs and great advice on how to create environmentally friendly interior design.

Lori even made a Top 10 list of Green Tips that Don’t Cost a Penny:

1. Clean often (and vacuum) with non toxic products.  That layer of dust in your home includes dead skin from humans and pets (not so bad) and a breakdown of walls, fabrics, paints, plastics which probably contain carcinogens.  This is why interior air is often more harmful than exterior air.  Keeping it clean is one of your best Green Interior Design strategies.  A proper green clean arsenal includes:

• white vinegar, baking soda, peroxide and rags for cleaning

• vegetable oil with a few drops of lemon for polishing

• a hefty portion of elbow grease

2. Remove shoes when entering your home.   You wouldn’t believe how many toxins your shoes pick up from the streets, driveways and gardens.  Taking off shoes before entering a home helps to prevent these chemicals from coming inside.

3. Open the windows and let the sunshine in.  Sunlight is a natural disinfectant.  Even if you live in an apartment, you can place pillows, blankets and mattresses in front of an open window to allow solar rays and fresh air to help sanitize them.

It’s a lot easier than steam cleaning them too!

4.  Reuse what you already have.  If you are inspired by a space you see in a magazine, look around your home or office.  What pieces do you have that are a similar look, scale, color?  Arrange existing items in the same way as the magazine spread.  You’ll be amazed by how you old things take on a fresh, new look.

5.  Next time you’re going to buy cut flowers, consider a flowering plant instead.  If you take care of it, it can last for decades.  An added bonus is that plants help to clean the air and produce oxygen. Gerber Daisies, Peace Lilies and Bamboo are cool looking plants that do this well. Studies have shown that plants improve your mood.  Market cut flowers are expensive and usually grown with copious amounts of petrochemical pesticides, insecticides and herbicides, plus  they often travel across continents to get to you.  That’s a lot of poison production and wasted energy.

You can see the rest of the Top 10 list on her blog — Glamorous Green!!

The winner of this week’s CSI Project challenge will receive a copy of Lori’s beautiful new book!!

All you need to do to win is enter YOUR project to this week’s linky.

And, if you want another entry for the book, leave a comment on this post.

You can order your own copy of Lori’s book through Amazon!