Making a Healthier Home
Seven Steps We Took to Make Our 120 Year Old Home a Healthy One:
Three years ago, my husband and I bought an old historical home that was originally built in 1900. It’s magical. It truly was waiting for us. But it was a, how should I say this, it was a PROJECT! Over the last three years, I have spent most of my days restoring this beautiful home back to its glory. I’m glad this is what I do for a living, if ya know what I mean. It has been a fun game of mixing the “fancy” and rather traditional style we inherited from the original architecture with our love for the laid back and undone kinda California “cool” style. But it was also important to modernize the mechanicals of the home to work for our family. When starting a new interior design project, cosmetic changes, like picking out paint colors is the fun stuff, and get’s those Pinterest boards a flowin’. But the stuff behind the walls, the electrical, plumbing updates, structural check ins, HVAC upgrades, ya know, the not so glam stuff, those are often not talked about. But in reality, this is the stuff that may be most important to how a home feels. Our biggest challenge, and most certainly the most important one we faced, was making sure that this home would be healthy. Not a small task.
As a lover and collector of old (old trucks, old clothes, old homes… you name it!) I know all too well that they sometimes take extra effort to take care of. While I don't always like to modernize (I make a living out of trying not to!) modernizing some things is a must. Historic homes are full of character, but with a constant kind of need for repairs and renovations. We tackled this head on when we realized it was time to update the cooling systems here, which made me start checking out our heating system. Turns out it all needed some worky work.
From lead testing the house and the water, to ditching our dumpy old radiators for a more modern forced air HVAC from Trane Residential, to bringing a mold mitigator in, we weren’t messing around.
Below are seven steps we took to make sure that this 120-year-old home was one where we could live happy and healthy lives all while taking care to keep and celebrate the beauty that is a historical home.
1. Check for Lead-Based Paint
This should be one of the very first things you do when you embark on the journey of making an old house your home. If you can hire a professional team to come in and test everything ...and I mean everything: interior and extra walls, your vintage furniture pieces, and (if you’re like me) your kid’s vintage toys! If having a professional team come in is not in your budget, there are also great at-home tests. No matter how you go about it, and no matter how much you love the look of chippy old paint, this is a step you won’t want to skip!
Lead is a problem you don’t want, but it typically is a problem that can be solved with my go-to solution for just about everything — a fresh coat of paint to lock things in!
2. Check Your Old Radiators for Mold
One of the most prevalent causes of household illness is every designer’s unwanted old friend… mold. Mold likes to lurk in damp environments, including basements, bathrooms, the areas under sinks, or even in wall and ceiling insulation, and, in my case, in the old, dumpy radiators that were inset into our walls. (Yikes!) Mold is a living organism that gives off airborne spores, which can cause allergic reactions as well as respiratory and skin problems. This was one of the many reasons we decided to switch over from our old dinosaur radiant heat system to a modern Trane forced air system. We ditched the old radiators and upgraded straight away. There are several ways to approach this, and a local Trane Residential dealer can walk you through it.
3. Check for Asbestos
Crazy enough, asbestos was once an extremely common building material. Typically asbestos is uncovered in basements and attics of older homes, and chances are you would not recognize it if you were looking at it, but if your house was built before the 1970s, it is likely that the vintage floor tile you want to replace or that pink insulation around your furnace contains asbestos. It is a durable, fire-resistant material composed of microscopic fibers and if these fibers become airborne you can breathe them in and they will become trapped in the lungs, causing various health problems.
If you are like me, you most likely like to think you can DIY your way through just about any home project, but this is one we should leave for the professionals. There’s more to removal than spray bottles and dust masks. It’s actually a huge to do. And legally, you need to have the pros handle it. Professional asbestos removal will involve sealing off the affected area, literally encapsulating the contaminated material, and then safely removing it from the site.
4. Install a Whole Home Air Cleaner into Your HVAC System - this one was exciting for me!
My family has a terrible time with allergies and when we decided to switch over to a forced air system, it was my biggest priority that we improve the air quality. With this in mind we added an air cleaner directly into our duct work. We chose the Trane CleanEffects® Whole Home Air Cleaner since it reduces the presence of potential asthma and allergy attack triggers in your home, including dust, pollen, pet hair and dander, dust mites, mildew, lint, fungus, even tobacco smoke, cooking grease, and some certain bacteria. Gross.
5. Test the Quality of Your Water
As humans, we are 60% water! It was important to us that not only our drinking water was up to par, but also the water we bathe in. And considering I am a bath girl, making sure the water in our home was safe was huge. You can get a free at-home test, hire professionals, and even research with your local health department in order to get information on the safety of your water.
In our case, with old pipes, we wanted to do extra. So we invested in some simple solutions like an Elkay Water Filter in our kitchen (this helped us cut out plastic water bottles entirely too — we just saved 10,000 bottles as of yesterday!) and Jolie showerheads (shout out to my hair looking awesome.) for most of our showers.
6. Bonus! Install an ERV Within Your HVAC System
Crazy enough one of the perks of old buildings is they are not air tight. When people install new windows in new buildings they are also sealing out all the fresh air. You need fresh air and you need to keep your air circulating, out with the old and and in with the new! Which is why at the end of the day we opted to keep our old windows. Yes, they can let the heat out a bit during the winter but they also let all of the good fresh air in. And that to us was super important.
For some added oomph in this area. We added the Trane Energy Recovery Ventilator to the whole rigamarole. It replaces stale indoor air with an equal amount of fresh, filtered air from the outside.
Bonus Points: It recycles energy by reusing otherwise-wasted energy and humidity. This lessens the demand on your HVAC system and lowers your energy bills!
7. Invest in Air Scrubbing and Duct Cleaning After Construction
The reality of construction is that it is a messy thing. It kicks up debris, dust, and all sorts of allergens, and it can require the use of chemicals and things that leave behind nasty fumes, like the VOCs in paint! These are all things you don’t want lingering around your house affecting your long-term or short-term health.
Once again, I have learned in the school of hard knocks, that it is of utmost importance to invest in a good air duct cleaning at the end of you construction projects. You just spent all this time updating your space so that you can enjoy it — make sure there is not any saw dust lingering in your air ducts that could get in the way of that.
On the flip side, (especially if you live in an old house) you will also want to invest in a medical grade air scrubbing so that you can make sure your space is safe from particulates, airborne bacteria, viruses, mold spores, and odors.
Find a local company that will come out and do both of these things for you at the same time! It may tack on two extra days to your project, but it will be so worth it.
Our Go -To Healthy Home Products:
Via Jolie