Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - [Homestead] Building a healthy house

homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Homestead mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Building a healthy house
  • Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2005 07:44:15 -0500

This is a very serious problem---most new houses are so tightly wrapped, the inside air is poisonous. You have to have an air-exchange system with an electrostatic precipitator to clean incoming fresh air and a heat-exchanger to warm it without having t0 expensively re-heat it.

While I would avoid building a multi-story house under most circumstances as being inherently dangerous to its occupants, there was a house an architecture student built when I was in college---cost him $4000 and was a thing of airy, well-lit beauty. His budget was so limited, he had to buy a cheap lot no one else would even look at. It was a south-facing cliff, only enough space at the top to park a car. The three-story house spilled down the cliff. First effectively heated solar house I ever saw---a solar chimney down the Southeast corner of the building. Heat would literally roar out of it at sunrise and had to be regulated. Nick Pine at Villanova would have been delighted with the result.



*washingtonpost.com* <http://www.washingtonpost.com/>
*Sensitivity Workshop*
A Retreat in Rural Virginia Thrives on Owners' 'Healthy House' Standards

By Jeff Turrentine
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 20, 2005; Page H01

If the well-meaning souls at Carter+Burton Architecture weren't sure what Bobbie Lively-Diebold meant when she told them she was "extremely sensitive" to chemicals, vapors and smells, they learned one day when she and her husband came to look over some blueprints.

Architect Jim Burton thought he and his associates had prepared. "We aired out the blueprints three hours before she got there, and we had all the windows open," he recalls. "/We/ couldn't detect any smell."

All the same, within minutes of arriving, Lively-Diebold began to respond violently to fumes left over from the blueprinting process. Her speech began to slur. She grew confused. She tried to walk, but could only wobble.

Fresh air revived her. "But the whole episode showed us just how serious her condition was," says Burton. "We took a lot of precautions, and they still weren't enough."

Lively-Diebold and her husband, Bob Diebold, had commissioned Carter+Burton to build a three-level contemporary residence just outside of Front Royal, on a cliff overlooking the Shenandoah River. It would be a place where the couple -- he a former physicist, she a former employee of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) -- could enjoy retirement in a peaceful, natural setting. They imagined huge windows overlooking hillocks of pasture on one side of the house and dense woods on the other; decks off upstairs bedrooms, where they could listen to the rush of the water in early morning; extra rooms for visiting children and grandchildren.

But Lively-Diebold knew she couldn't enjoy such amenities if she was constantly battling sickness. So she and her husband asked Carter+Burton to build their dream home according to "healthy house" standards. The result, they hoped, would be a house in which innovative design, careful selection of materials and state-of-the-art technology safeguard against the presence of the substances that Lively-Diebold says her system cannot tolerate.

Many of the standards to which this house and others have been built can be found in "The Healthy House," a 1989 book by John Bower, now in its fourth updated edition. With his wife, Lynn, Bower founded the Healthy House Institute in 1992; between the books he writes and the resource center in Bloomington, Ind., he and his wife oversee /(//www.hhinst.com/ <http://www.hhinst.com>/)/, he has devoted himself to helping individuals find ways to rid their households of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs.

Healthy houses, Bower says, are not just for people like Bobbie Lively-Diebold. Many of us, he believes, suffer from indoor air pollution, without even realizing it. "Sniffles, sore throats, neck aches, all kinds of symptoms -- there are people who think that a lot of them are related to indoor air quality," he says. "The air we breathe is one of the primary ways we take the environment into our systems. The thinking with regard to sensitive people is that they're the canaries in the coal mines. It's time to do something about the problem once the canaries get sick."

Lively-Diebold, 68, traces the history of her disorder back to a single day in 1988, when she arrived at work in the EPA complex at Waterside Mall in Southwest Washington. New carpet had just been installed and was still in the early stages of "off-gassing," the term used to describe the release of chemical vapors from a material -- in this case, the glue binding the carpet's fibers to its backing.

Immediately, she says, she began to experience the problems that plague her to this day: disorientation, slurred speech, difficulty breathing and impaired mobility. Lively-Diebold believes that exposure to the off-gassing carpet and to other VOCs given off during the building's renovation irreparably affected her respiratory and neurological systems. She was among a group of 19 employees who filed suit against Waterside's owners and managers, citing permanent damage to their health. Of the original plaintiffs, five, including Lively-Diebold, were eventually awarded restitution totaling nearly $1 million dollars.

The ordeal, she claimed, had left her with debilitating symptoms known collectively as multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome, or MCS. Currently, the medical community classifies MCS as a "syndrome of unknown origin," like the more widely publicized Gulf War syndrome or chronic fatigue syndrome. The absence of a universally accepted definition of MCS, and the idiosyncratic nature of its symptoms, have made it controversial.

By now, Lively-Diebold is used to cynicism about her condition. It's one of the reasons she wanted to find "the type of architect who would listen to your input, not just tell you what you need to have." When the couple settled on a site and went shopping for architects, they were impressed by the way in which Carter+Burton used green principles to effect strikingly modern designs. "They had already done things that were energy-efficient and environmentally sensitive," says Lively-Diebold, "so that was a good start." Most important, she says, Burton and the firm's founding partner, Page Carter, didn't blanch upon hearing her list of requirements. "They seemed excited and open to the idea."

Even so, Burton recalls the "steep learning curve" faced by the architects, builder Stephen Whittington, interior designer Michelle Timberlake, and the contractors who had to abandon tried-and-true methods and routines. For starters, the entire site had to be designated a no-smoking area -- a tough sell among construction workers for whom coffee-and-cigarette breaks are sacred. All building materials had to be chosen from preapproved lists; finding certain items, such as a humidifier air filter that wouldn't emit mold-conducive warm air, proved difficult.

Of paramount importance was that off-gassing be kept to a minimum. Chemically inert or natural materials such as stone, concrete, stucco and wood were used whenever possible. For people with MCS, high-VOC varnishes, oils, glues and sealants are among a newly built house's most incorrigible offenders; Lively-Diebold's purview extended even to the oil-based release agents used to coat the concrete foundation. "I went with my husband to a job site to check my tolerance," she recalls. "I just walked around and smelled them."

When they prompted a flare-up, she and the building team settled on an unorthodox alternative: Wesson oil. "It worked just fine," she says. (Though for a while, she confesses, subcontractors jokingly referred to the building as "the salad house.")

In some cases, as with the stress-skin panels that cover the house, due diligence entailed all-night experiments, with Lively-Diebold volunteering as a guinea pig. "I slept with them right next to me," she explains. "If I had any problems, they went right out the door."

The house, now two years old, does not boast its virtuousness conspicuously. A visitor's initial impression is purely architectural: warm materials, an abundance of natural light, the balance of elegant forms and expansive volumes. Next come the design details: Noguchi hanging lanterns in the entrance hall, svelte Barcelona loungers in the living room, a Saarinen Tulip table and chairs in the breakfast nook.

The innovations that help make the infrastructure of this house "healthy" are in no way visible. VOC-free paint, once rare but now widely available, looks as rich as regular paint. The minimally treated, low-gassing marine-grade plywood from which the kitchen cabinets are made is indistinguishable from its standard-issue counterpart. Behind a plain-looking door on the lower level, filters, ventilators, vacuums and humidifiers vigilantly defend against airborne pathogens. This system so thoroughly controls the flow and exchange of air that the house receives a complete air transfusion every few hours.

"Separation, ventilation and filtration," says Burton. "It's not a healthy house if you don't have all three."

The delicate balance of separate systems, the need for careful monitoring and enlightened stewardship: If the healthy house invites comparisons to Earth's environment, it's no accident. Burton was a student of Samuel Mockbee, a larger-than-life figure who devoted himself to promoting sustainable, socially conscious architecture. The teacher's influence on the pupil is obvious when the topic turns to, say, hardwoods. For Burton, the health of the rain forest is directly linked to the health of the homeowner. Harvesting lumber from sustainably managed forests, he says, reduces ozone depletion, which in turn makes his client breathe easier.

For Bobbie Lively-Diebold, living in a healthy house has changed everything. The world outside her door -- with all its marauding chemicals, pollutants and VOCs -- still has the capacity to make her sick. "But my body is in a better position to tolerate things," she says. "This is like a detox center. A safe place."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company







Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page