A home library is not something for everyone, but if you do have an inclination towards books or even love collecting the rare ones, then this can really add immensely both to the look of your home and how people view you when they come for a visit. A home library talks about your personality, shouts about what kind of a person you are and it also ensures that those who walk in, leave with something added to their wisdom. It can make for a great topic of conversation and earn you some great new buddies.

Of course, a whole library at home looks hard to put together, but with these tips, you will find that it is not that hard as you thought.

#1 Pick the perfect room and devote the required space

The most significant aspect towards building a grand home (healthy Building) library is to pick the right room. Obviously, preferable it should have a high ceiling along with space for racks and other accessories. You can of course, devote just a part of a certain room for this purpose, but an entire room that is totally dedicated makes it a lot more wonderful. Also make sure it’s large enough to accommodate your entire book collection and maybe the ones you are going to add in the future.

#2 Choose the type of shelves that you feel would be apt

You can either go for built-in shelves, racks that are made of wood, separate standings sshelves that occupy more space or the ones that hang from the ceiling. No matter which variety you pick ensure that they all go well with the furnishings you have in the room and are all crafted from wood. Wooden racks give your home library an authentic and original feel that cannot be achieved by other modern materials.

#3 Colors, shades and usage of materials

Dark and Victorian styled colors are often used in libraries to give them a more antique feeling. The same can be done for your home library. Once again the use of woodwork grained in darker textures helps a great deal in capturing this essence. This will go well with any collection or theme you chose. Such as the French, Spanish or Italian collection. The appeal for such interiors is almost universal.

#4 Accessorize with rugs, lamps, tables and chairs

Use tables and chairs inside your home library according to the space available and the comfort factor. You can get a bit unconventional and even go for a couch so that you feel more at home. A small television that is put in a closed cabin, a fine rug and an antique lamp will do wonders to the interiors. This though is a matter of individual choice and you can go the way you chose with accessories.

#5 Use lighting to add to your book collection

Use lighting smartly so that it brings the beauty out of your rare and specially bounded books while it hides those rugged looking old copies of the paperbacks. Your home library can be altered and changed by using lighting in various different patterns. The lighting must be most often soft, ambient and must reflect the studious mood inside.

Apart from all those, one can also add a dash of class with sculptures and plants which will bring life to the home library. Since the walls are already full, it will be such standing decorative that will bring added beauty to your home library. If you are willing to spend a tad bit extra, then you can create your very own favorite library in your own home

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The first Healthy Building News for 2007 is a week late. On the eve of publication last week, our scheduled topic was rendered moot by the US EPA’s decision to prohibit the residential use of a toxic pressure treated wood formula known as ACC (acid copper chromate). Its main ingredient, hexavalent chromium, is the human carcinogen that made Erin Brockovich a household name.

The urgency of the pending EPA decision had itself bumped our original topic for the 2007 inaugural issue — highlighting the positive implications of the ambitious USGBC initiatives unveiled last November at GreenBuild. The EPA’s surprise but welcome decision brings our thesis full circle: the growing weight of the evidence suggests that the climate of the green building movement is changing, for the better.

Consider this: the US EPA did not move to restrict the use of arsenic-based pressure treated wood until nearly a decade after the green building movement’s journal of record, Environmental Building News, suggested it should be phased out.

Yet last week, the notoriously anti-environmental Bush Administration banned the chromium-based compound for residential use before a single board reached the playground. One significant, arguably decisive, difference in the intervening decade is the fact that the wood treaters defended arsenic until the end, but they largely opposed the new toxic brew being developed by the chromium interests. As one industry insider put it (off the record, of course): We’ve turned that page. We don’t want to use materials that people believe cause cancer.

The green building movement, by and large, hasn’t turned that page, yet. The USGBC’s LEED® Rating System has yet to proscribe chromium treated wood, or for that matter most other materials made from chemicals that cause cancer or birth defects. But the USGBC leadership team is capable of writing a new chapter on healthy building.

At GreenBuild in Denver, USGBC CEO Rick Fedrizzi introduced a package of climate change initiatives which, taken together, did more than promise to make carbon dioxide reductions from buildings “immediate and measurable.” They set a precedent for a future “bias for action” where, he promised, “results will always matter more than intentions.”

That bias was evident in Fedrizzi’s acknowledgement of the Living Building Challenge. The Living Building Challenge is the brainchild of the Cascadia GBC’s new CEO, Jason McLennan. Its prominent placement on the GreenBuild Member’s Day agenda gives a green light to the organization’s grassroots leadership, signaling that ambition, innovation and leadership are welcomed and rewarded.

The Living Building Challenge does not have credits. There are only prerequisites and a challenge to continuously improving building design and operation to be as beneficial to the planet as possible.

Increasingly, these improvements hold the promise of fully integrating healthy building principles into green building strategies, as Fedrizzi also acknowledged in his discussion of the business case for building green schools.

Now it can only be a matter of time before engaged USGBC members lead the organization to embrace the mainstream consensus that green building materials must also be healthy building materials; that green buildings should be as non-toxic to the planet as they are climate neutral; and that international treaties that seek to reduce global toxic contamination should be honored as much as those which seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The USGBC’s message at GreenBuild was that the organization intends to liberate, not litigate the definition of a green building.

That’s a climate change that will benefit us all.