Your house is trying to kill you (90% of the time)...

It’s true.

We spend 90% of our lives indoors. Boo!

If you live in a typical house constructed in the past 70 years, chances are it is chock FULL of chemicals.

In the walls, on the cabinets, the flooring… Some of these chemicals are known carcinogens. Thousands of these chemicals have never been tested for their potential health impacts.

It’s also the way we build these days that can harm us.

Energy-efficiency standards, a “good thing”, mean that your house is wrapped in plastic (a vapor barrier to keep drafts out).  Essentially, you are living inside a plastic bag.  Humidity gets trapped. Mold grows. Indoor air quality plummets.

And guess what?

It doesn’t matter if your house is a studio condo or a 3 bd., 2ba, suburban family home, or a Bel Air mansion because they all are built with the same materials and suffer from the same sickness. Consequently, you and your family can get sick.

You may be asking…

“Don’t building codes protect me?” 

Building codes are designed to protect you from things like a roof caving in on your head, steps that would make you trip and fall, and electrical fires. They are intended to ensure that you have a toilet that flushes properly and that your stove won’t blow up or kill you with carbon monoxide.

Building codes do not regulate the chemicals that go into materials.

Your kitchen counter could be made out of uranium and the building inspector would pass it as long as it was installed at the proper height. 

“What about the EPA? Isn’t this part of their job??”

No, not really.

While the EPA does test chemicals that go into consumer products, the pace at which they are able to do so is, erm, snail-like. 

Since 1976, when the Toxic Substances Control Act was passed, the EPA has tested 200 of the 40,000 chemical products currently being used.

Once testing begins they have seven years to complete their analysis and then manufacturers have five more years to stop using that chemical.

So there can be up to a 12-year lag time before known carcinogens get pulled from the market. And even then they can be quickly replaced with a new, untested chemical and the clock starts all over again...

“My house was built by a reputable company. Certainly they wouldn’t poison me.”

Your builder may turn out high-quality homes on time and on budget.

However, given the number of different chemicals in materials and the appalling lack of information about their potential health effects, most contractors don’t have the time or resources to ensure that every board and surface in your home is non-toxic.

The good news is there are ways to combat these problems! PHEW...

We learned about how to create healthy and healthier living spaces during a Build Outside the Box Mastermind Live Q&A with Joss Krayenhoff of SIREWALL USA. 

Joss became interested in the health effects of our current housing stock after he lost three people close to him to cancer in a short period of time. One of them was the carpenter who mentored him.

We asked Joss his top recommendations, things that homeowners can do to reduce their exposure to toxins and improve indoor air quality.

Eliminate unhealthy materials in your home:

- Get rid of carpeting…it’s made with nasty things and stores more nastiness during its life. Even with regular cleaning, by the time carpeting is removed from a building it weighs 10x what it did when it was installed! YUCK.

- Use plywood instead of chipboard for cabinets. The urea formaldehyde used in chipboard is toxic and has a long off-gassing half-life.  Plywood off-gasses much less and uses the much less toxic phenol-formaldehyde.


Prevent mold from growing in your house:

- Fix roof leaks and make sure your roof is vented. Mold grows in moist environments and a wet roof cavity is the perfect place for it to fester.

- Make sure you have proper drainage around your foundation. This will help keep mold from growing in your basement and/or walls.

And if all this seems like too much hassle, and you’d rather start from scratch, consider building a home using natural materials. 

Ones that have a track record of thousands of years.  Ones that are simple, from and of the earth. 
 

Clay.

Sand.

Rock.

Straw.

Hemp.

Lime.

You get the picture. 

What do these materials have in common?

They are not full of unpronounceable chemicals and can be used in a variety of ways to make thermally-efficient, beautiful, long-lasting, healthy homes.

Also, they are all used in the different wall systems presented by the experts in the Build Outside the Box Mastermind. 

For more information about better building solutions and how you can get out of the box, follow us on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel!