My Hard Hat Tour

I just visited Parkside Commons to see how things are coming along and Frank took me on a “hard hat” tour. He showed me where the leasing office will be. It is beautiful. And you can’t smell anything when you walk around. Frank explained how the carpets and paints are low VOC. What on earth is low VOC?? Well, it’s a “green” and healthy thing where their carpets and paints don’t give off smelly vapors and gases. You know when you walk into a new house or a new apartment and you smell that construction smell? Well, that smell is pollutants that come from the building materials. Since Parkside is a green building, you don’t get that construction smell. We will have the same materials in our apartments. By the way, when they open the office, they will have a computer available to show people how much electricity they are generating from the solar panels on the roof! So here comes another interesting part of the tour. One of the walls in the main lobby is being made into a “sustainable” mural. Parkside hired an artist to create a wall full of green materials - not green the color, but environmentally-friendly green. The wall is covered with pieces of cork, bamboo and recycled glass in interesting patterns. A walk by the wall is a visual reminder that I have chosen to live in a green building.