Ahem. Before we get started today, allow me to direct your attention to the cover line of this month's Dwell magazine: "Renovate! Reuse! Recycle! Breathing Life Into Old Buildings." Now that's what I'm talking about. (But why you gotta bite my style, Dwell magazine?)

Let's move along down this road a little more. I was leafing through a book today: Be Your Own House Contractor, by Carl Heldmann. And I came across this little note: "Don't look at building a house as one huge job. Viewing each phase or step as a separate job that you can easily accomplish and cross off your list makes the overall task seem less monumental."

That goes for green remodeling, too. You don't have to go all green right now. First of all, you can't. Unless you're planning on ditching your car, growing your own food, and composting your, er, night soils, you're never going to be 100 percent green. But every little bit helps, so why not start with the little bits? Not to keep harping on the compact fluorescent bulbs, but case in point: We have about 50 or 60 light bulbs working in our house right now. Our electric load for the year - the amount of kilowatt hours we burn through from January to January - is about 7800 Kwh. If we replaced 19 of those bulbs - not even half of them - with CFLs we'd use around 850 fewer kilowatt hours. That's more than ten percent of our electricity load, just by changing a few bulbs - not even all of them. That's about a month and a half lopped off our electric bill. Put another way, that's 850 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions every year. That's one house making a change. Any guesses how many houses there are in America alone?

It's a single step, one that might take a weekend: 850 pounds of greenhouse emissions, dusted in one weekend. If every house in America replaced just one bulb, it'd be like taking 800,000 cars off the road. (Forget Hands Across America - that would be some serious global action. If only we had some kind of visionary leader to promote that sort of energy efficiency movement. Ah well.)

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Earlier this week a couple of you wrote in to say that building and remodeling green are prohibitively expensive. I guess it depends on when you spend your money. Do you spend it now, or do you spend it later? You can buy a six-pack of CFLs down at the local GiantMart for about $10. That's about $1.65 for a bulb you'll have to replace in 2015, a bulb that saves you 65 cents of every dollar you're spending to power your incandescent bulbs. Incandescents, meanwhile, cost about 50 cents apiece, but you'll replace them ten times as often as CFLs. In other words, by buying an incandescent bulb, you're saving a dollar now for the opportunity to spend four more dollars later.

Some stats from last week's green building conference: Out of 33 diverse green buildings built in California over the last 10 years, the average cost increase of going green was 1.8 percent - on a half-million-dollar house, that's nine grand. Five of those buildings had no cost increase. And this is before factoring in the savings gained with higher efficiency the lessened electrical loads and lower demands for natural gas and clean water.

(Incidentally, the National Association of Home Builders is developing a residential green building standard; one of the conference's presenters is involved in the particulars.)

Anyway, that's what I want this blog to be about. Not wholesale renovation and overinflated loans, but what I can do and what you can do to make our homes greener, more efficient, and more economical - now, and realistically.