I’m Sarah Jividen

Hello, and welcome!

I created Heavenly Green Home to help families act on climate change by making eco-friendly choices at home. I am an RN and healthcare writer – but I’ve harbored a passion for writing about sustainable energy, housing, and decor for years. I think many of us want to make actionable eco-friendly changes in how we live. But where and how do we start?

As a native Californian, I am used to seeing solar panels on homes, especially newer ones. But as we were looking to move to the Chicago area, I was surprised to find that most homes around the city don’t have them.

That is partly because most homes are much older in the areas we wanted to live – some even 100+ years or more. The wear-and-tear of yearly housing maintenance seemed frighteningly expensive, not to mention incredibly inefficient. I was a little sad to see that the third-largest city in America – and arguably one of the coldest (my friend jokingly refers to it as a “frozen tundra,” which it’s not, but still really super cold) has homes with literally the same energy efficiency as they did 100 years ago.

But after months of searching – both online and in-person – I finally found “the one.” It was the most energy-efficient home I have ever been in, and it was in the exact area we wanted to live: close to the train, and walking distance to the town and the kid’s schools. It even had solar panels. It was love at first sight. 

But best of all is that I could imagine myself staying efficiently warm, even if it’s ten below outside with a windchill of -50.

A Little About Me

I am a registered nurse with a decade of patient care experience working in neuro/trauma and emergency room care. But way before nursing school, I earned a BA in Journalism and wrote for a tiny newspaper.

After years of working as a nurse and starting a family, I dreamed of working at home from my kitchen table. I wanted to figure out a way to combine writing with my experience working in healthcare. 

So finally, in 2020, I started Health Writing Solutions LLC, a healthcare writing business. My goal was to get away from working arduous 12-hour shifts and spending so much time away from my family. I wanted to use my nursing experience to create healthcare content from the bird’s-eye perspective of someone who has spent a decade working in direct patient care. 

Since then, I have worked as a journalist and copywriter for several online publications about various healthcare topics, education for healthcare professionals, and the nursing profession. I also started a nursing blog called Mother Nurse Love, where I write about lifestyle, career, burnout, and career topics for busy mom RNs.

This year, I felt an urge to get more creative and write about another topic close to my heart: sustainability. Finding my sustainable “unicorn house” was like a sign pointing me in the direction of this new website.

One of the things I heard from readers on my last website was that they enjoy my honest candor and appreciate my quest for finding solutions for the busy Mom RN. I hope to provide the same value here with Heavenly Green Home.

Thank you for stopping by and reading all the way through! Feel free to message me about any sustainability topics that interest you. I like researching issues I don’t know much about, and you may even inspire my next article.

Sarah