Every good field guide has a few dog-eared pages. The bird you actually see at the feeder. The mushroom you were told not to touch. It goes everywhere with you, it never lectures, and it always tells you where to look next.
As of today, that’s what Whole Earth Home is! We’ve rebuilt the site around a new way of looking at a home: as a place you get to know room by room, one small fact at a time. There are new cards, new colors, a new page that holds the whole collection, and a calmer read everywhere else. Grab a coffee. Here’s the tour.
The tour in 30 seconds
- Field Notes: 36 tips you can act on today, each on its own card.
- Numbers: one fact per card, readable in two seconds, source included.
- Seven rooms, seven colors, from Heat and power all the way to the Closet.
- One page for all of it: the new Field Notes page.
- An easier read everywhere else: links you can see, steadier headings, cleaner tables.
Stop 1: How we see a home now
Before we changed a single color, we wrote down what we actually believe. Five things made the cut.
- Small and often beats big and someday. A habit you keep every night adds up faster than the big project you keep putting off.
- A number you can’t check isn’t worth much. So every card names where its fact came from.
- Homes come in rooms, not categories. Nobody stands in the kitchen thinking about sustainability. They think about the fridge. So that’s how we file things now.
- Curiosity works better than guilt. Nobody ever weatherstripped a door because they felt bad. They did it because they found the draft.
- Useful things deserve to look good. If a tip is worth keeping, it’s worth a nice card.
Everything else on this tour comes out of that list.
Stop 2: Meet the Field Note
A Field Note is the smallest useful thing we can tell you. Here’s how to read one.
- The tab tells you which room the note lives in.
- The number is its place in the collection.
- The tip is one thing you can do today.
- The why explains it in plain words.
- The source says where the fact came from, every single time.
And here’s a real one, out in the wild:
That’s the whole thing. No scrolling past a life story to find the tip! We’re starting with 36 of them. Some are classics. Some are the kind of thing we wish someone had told us years ago, like the fact that a stick of incense finds a drafty window better than your hand ever will.
Stop 3: Seven rooms, seven colors
Every note lives in one of seven rooms, and every room gets its own color and its own little icon on the tab. Give it a week and you’ll know them on sight, the way you know a trail marker before you can read it.
- Heat and power (the flame): furnaces, thermostats, light bulbs and everything with a plug.
- Kitchen (the apple): the fridge, the dishwasher and the food we’d rather not throw away.
- Laundry (the shirt): washers, dryers and the humble drying rack.
- Bath and water (the drop): leaks, showers and the toilet that runs all night.
- Air (the window): humidity, filters, radon and carbon monoxide.
- Garden (the leaf): leaves, compost, and a good winter for the bugs and birds.
- Closet (the hanger): wool, moths and cedar. Yes, the closet got its own color!
Stop 4: Numbers you can read in two seconds
Numbers are the other half of the guide. Here’s the same fact told the old way and the new way.
The old way:
According to the EPA’s WaterSense program, household leaks can waste nearly 10,000 gallons of water a year in the average home, which is roughly equivalent to the amount of water needed to wash more than 270 loads of laundry.
The new way:
By the numbers
10,000
gallons a year lost to leaks in a typical home
That’s about 270 loads of laundry.
Same fact, a fraction of the effort. One big figure, one plain line, one source. If a stat needs a legend to make sense, it doesn’t get a card. A few house rules keep them honest, too: bars are drawn to scale, the one that matters gets the color while the comparison stays gray, and a range shows its top end and says so.
Stop 5: The Field Notes page
All 36 notes and 13 Numbers now live on one page, sorted by room, with a button for each room at the top. Think of it as the index at the back of the field guide. It’s the page to bookmark!
Heat and power Kitchen Laundry Bath and water Air Garden Closet By the numbers
Stop 6: Everything else got easier to read
Some changes are quieter. You might not notice them right away, and we’d count that as a win.
- Links now carry a soft green underline, so you can actually find them.
- Headings are smaller and steadier, so a long guide feels less like it’s shouting.
- Tables lost their heavy grid lines and gained room to breathe.
- Product picks wear a dark folder tab that says what they’re for, so a recommendation never looks like a Field Note.
- Side notes, like the one below, get a green Good to know tab.
The logo was our starting point. The big, heavy figures on the Numbers cards take their cue from EARTH in our logo, and the small spaced-out capitals on every tab echo WHOLE and HOME. The green in our links and tabs is the logo’s own green.
Try it tonight: four notes before dinner
The best way to get a feel for the guide is to use it. Each of these takes ten minutes or less, and none of them costs a thing.
Do one and you’ve used the field guide. Do all four and you’re officially a regular!
What hasn’t changed
Same voice, same honesty, and the same refusal to sell you guilt. We still show our math, and we still tell you when the experts disagree. When a tip is our own practical advice rather than an agency’s finding, the card says Whole Earth Home, so you always know which is which.
Where to wander next
Open the Field Notes page and pick a room, or start with a story that already carries the new cards:
- How to cut your heating bill this winter for under $100
- Phantom power: what your house uses while everyone is asleep
- The 9 things in your house quietly costing you $1,000 a year
- The winter indoor air problem
- Forget spring cleaning. Fall is the one that actually matters.
We’ll keep adding notes as we research and test new things. Got a tip you swear by? Write to us at hello@wholeearthhome.com, or just hit reply if this landed in your inbox. We’d love to hear it!
FAQ
Will older stories get Field Notes too?
Yes, gradually. We add them where a tip genuinely fits the story, one or two at a time, never as filler.
Do the cards show up in email?
They do. Subscribers see the same cards in their inbox, and the full collection lives on the site.
How do you check the numbers?
Every figure is checked against the agency that published it before it goes on a card, and the source is printed on the card itself. If a source updates its numbers, we update the card.
More from the field guide: Field Notes · Energy & Bills · Healthy Home
Sources: EPA WaterSense (household leaks, toilet leak test); ENERGY STAR (washer energy, dishwashers); U.S. Department of Energy and Consumer Product Safety Commission (water heater setting). Top photo: Amélie Aronson on Unsplash.