As you may all know, I’m someone who tries to live an environmentally conscious life. We’ve all been on this Earth for a shorter time than dinosaurs, yet we’ve managed to make a huge effect on the environment. So as much as possible, I try to minimize my carbon footprint and try to be eco-friendly whenever I can.

I’ve recently been tinkering around our home, and have been on a bit of a DIY kick lately. I find that DIYs are a really great way to reduce my impact on the environment. There’s a lot of things that you can do with DIY solutions. Some DIYs, for example, use only a very small number of ingredients but still deliver the same effect as store-bought products.

For example, did you know that you can create a lot of home cleaning products with just baking soda and vinegar?

I’ve also taken to painting my kids’ rooms on my own. Painting their rooms posed a bit of a challenge as well since I knew for a fact that my kids would still be spending a lot of time there, sleeping, playing and probably touching the wall often. So I had to find a child and infant safe paint that’s nontoxic to make sure my DIYing doesn’t affect them adversely.

As someone who is passionate about natural products, it was only natural that I had to find paint that did not give off a lot of chemical fumes, and would be safe to have around kids. Luckily I was able to find a brand of paint made out of natural ingredients. This brand I found online used milk proteins, lime, and naturally occurring colorants to produce a vibrant shade of teal that I really liked for my kids’ rooms. Plus, it was compostable, so hurray for zero waste!

Aside from that, I’ve also decided to craft a few other things. We have a lot of old clothes, especially the ones that my kids have grown out of. So I decided to take a few of our clothes and try to make something out of them. I took some of our old t-shirts and turned them into yarn, and attempted to crochet a few rugs that we could use around the home.

It took me a while, but I freed up some space, and I scored my family some colorful bathroom mats! I decided to donate the rest of the clothes that we didn’t need and I didn’t use for my projects to charity.

Being environmentally friendly and eco-conscious doesn’t have to always be about making sure that you buy only organic or that you buy sustainable things. It’s really about making smart choices, whether it’s using better paint for your projects or making things out of scratch.

What this whole DIY kick taught me is that resourcefulness is important if you want to minimize your impact on the environment.