Photo by L. Marie.

Judy wrote into the Parent Hacks blog because she didn’t like carrying bulky container of moisturizer, but the cold winter weather made her son’s face really dry. Her solution?

I found an unused contact lens case and realized it was perfect for carrying the lotion. It won’t leak, and if you want, the two sides are labeled so you could put two different items in it (i.e. lotion and Vaseline). They’re easy to clean, and if you’re a contact wearer, you’ll have a ton kicking around the house.

At first consideration it would seem a contact case wouldn’t be large enough to hold an appreciable amount of anything, but upon further inspection of the multitude of contact cases scattered around my house my opinion changed. The majority of cases were deep enough to easily hold more moisturizer than most people could reasonably use before being back home and able to fill it up again. Practical way to reuse a contact case and save space or repurposing gone too far?

Design blog Design*Sponge posts a series of projects centered around using easy, home-brewed stencils to add visual interest to your home. The process they use for mirrors and glass windows is pretty neat: you apply a sheet of contact paper to the glass, smooth it out and draw the pattern you want onto the contact paper and then trace the pattern lightly with an exacto knife. Peel the inside of the pattern out and you’ve got a stencil adhered right onto the glass you can color in with some basic latex or acrylic paint. You can even go for an etched look without damaging the glass by using clear acrylic glaze instead of colored paint. For more detailed instructions, check out the full tutorial at the link below.

The idea is gaining ground within a group of companies looking to understand and reduce their consumption of water, including Coca Cola, whose chairman has pledged to eventually balance out all of the water used in its products and manufacturing processes through conservation elsewhere (over 80 billion gallons worth!).

This got me to thinking: what would it take to be water-neutral in our own homes, meaning that we don’t import any net water? If we include all of the water that goes into our food and the products we consume, then it gets ugly real fast (see this post on the water content of food, for example). But what about our direct water use – showers, irrigation, toilets, etc?

Now, this would require some significant changes to a home and to local building/health/safety codes, since the only way to go water-neutral is to reuse graywater and harvest/store rainwater. Both of these options now face numerous permitting and legal obstacles around the country (including some pretty counterintuitive ones, like Utah and Colorado bans on capturing ANY rainwater at your home). Assuming we could, though, how much rain would it take to provide a family’s annual water needs?

After some pretty simple calculations, it turns out that the home of a typical family of three could be water-neutral in climates receiving roughly 25″ of rainfall or more per year under the following assumptions:

• Three-person household;
• Rainwater captured, stored and reused;
• Graywater system used;
• Indoor water efficiency measures employed: low-flow showerheads, toilets, faucets and appliances;
• Outdoor water efficiency measures employed: smart irrigation control, rain shutoff, soil moisture sensors, climate-compatible landscaping.

This basically means that home water neutrality is feasible if you live in the Midwest, anywhere along the US Atlantic or Gulf Coasts, in the Northwest and in higher rainfall areas of the West and Mountain West (here’s a set of maps to review for your area). The detailed calculations are shown below. You can use our Environmental Impact Calculator to make similar calculations for your home and region.