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By Sharyn Alden

When you start thinking about buying a new home, you’ll undoubtedly look for homes that best fit your lifestyle and needs.

But wait, not so fast. Before you start picking out paint colors and looking at floor samples, think green.

You’ll reap big benefits if you look for a new home that has plenty of green features already built in.

Homes with green amenities not only offer good indoor air quality, minimal heat loss, good airflow, advanced drainage systems and other streamlined functions, they are efficient and economical to operate.

So plat your course before you make your next move. When you do, you’ll end up with the home you want, plus, you’ll benefit from a cleaner, more sustainable energy future for you and your family.

Conservancy Place, a 650-acre master-planned community in DeForest, situated along the Yahara River corridor, includes several Green Built Homes. The community offers the best of both worlds for homeowners. It is where the future of development— of creating a community and protecting a natural environment, come together.

It’s a place where you can live, work and play, where housing options are varied, and where you can take pleasure each time that you come home.

It’s exactly why Dan Jansen and his wife Lydia chose their Green Built Home at Conservancy Place. The couple moved to Madison from the East Coast four years ago.

When they began shopping for a home in the Madison area, they made a conscious decision to buy a home with “green features.”

“When Lydia and I saw this house we were blown away by the use of its green, environmentally friendly features throughout the house,” said Jansen.

The family’s home has passed two stringent green-home assessments. It has been certified as a Wisconsin Energy Star House and also as a Green Built Home.

Jansens’ Conservancy Place home, across from the Yahara River, was also landscaped with green building in mind. “I enjoy walking the Catfish Trail here with my five-year-old son and watching the Yahara River go by,” Jansen notes.

Typically, you won’t see a green home if you drive by it. But behind the scenes numerous green built-in features are working to improve the environment and make sustainable living easy and fun.

In the Jansen home, which has highly efficient appliances, some of its green-built amenities include formaldehyde-free insulation, nontoxic natural materials, and recycled features such as fibers in the carpeting, bamboo floors, and the use of low volatile organic compounds (VOC) paint which has numerous environmental benefits.

Jansen has found many people don’t fully understand the savings that homeowners can realize when green amenities are built into their home. Perhaps the biggest takeaway message is this: “It doesn’t have to cost an arm and leg to live in a green home in a green environment,” he says.

One of those green living features is installed on the Jansen’s kitchen wall. “That’s our energy meter,” he says. “It gives us continual read-outs of the energy we’re using,” says Jansen. “It’s not only efficient, it’s fun to follow and see the amount of energy we’re using. It’s a reminder to make lifestyle changes like turning lights off when we leave a room.”

Jansen points out it can be a cost saver when you buy a home with green features already built in compared to adding them in later. “It’s a big benefit for the homeowner to know that these amenities are already there working for you.”

So what is it like to live in a Green Built Home? For starters, an energy efficient home may mean big savings in energy bills. The Jansens’ former East Coast home was a 1500 square-foot home built in 1942. They enjoy comparing utility bills between the two homes.

Their 3,000 square-foot home is twice as big as their former home, but the difference in utility bills is staggering. “Our utility bills were about three times higher in the old home,” says Jansen. “The energy costs here are a great financial return. It’s just one reason why it pays to buy a green home.”

On one section of Jansen’s property a rock garden contains a French drain, an environmentally friendly drainage system. “When it rains, and it fills with water, my son and I like to go outside and watch the water ‘percolating’ in our innovative drain system,” he said.

All this and more comes with living green. Jansen succinctly sums up his family’s experience. “Our family has found it’s a boatload of fun living in a green environment.”