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Building a healthy house

An interview with the client:

ABOUT MULTIPLE CHEMICAL SENSITIVITIES, AND THE PROCESS OF BUILDING THIS MCS HOUSE

There are various nicknames—“environmental illness”, “ecological illness”, “chemical allergies”-- but most of the medical community calls this illness “MCS - Multiple Chemical Sensitivity.” They apologize even in print that it’s not a very good name!

When I was first affected, I didn’t know what was happening to me. It was right after we moved into an old but lovely house in Seattle. Coincidentally at the same time my employer had changed our offices to a huge, newly renovated office space. From a chemical standpoint, because the house had water damage—meaning mold and yeast spores in the air--combined with all of the new construction chemicals from my work place, I became overloaded. They call it “tipping the balance” where these chemicals build up and build up and build up and finally your body can’t process them anymore. They’re not sure what goes wrong in the central nervous system of the brain, but something switches off. It may be a combination of genetics and environment, or it may be that if any person has a particular combination of exposures, they would get sick.

The whole immune system is in over drive when you have MCS. You’re going to react to the very fact that things are new. Even non-toxic paint has an odor. Even low-toxic floor finish is going to have to be in place for quite a while before an MCS person can be in that building.

Every little piece that goes into an MCS house has to be tested for toxicity to the patient and, I think one of the sources of greatest frustration for MCS patients as well as their doctors, and one of the sources of greatest suspicion on the part of people who don’t understand MCS, is that every MCS patient has slightly different reactions to different things. For one person a product might be okay, but for the next MCS person there’s something in it that is their particular toxin; it may have a little bit too much of a certain kind of glue, or low level formaldehyde. That makes it difficult to get just the right material. There are methodologies that have been developed to help MCS people know in advance what they’re going to be toxic to and what’s okay for them.

One thing I’ve learned about the environment and its effect on a person who has MCS is that the more natural a material is, generally speaking, the more inert it is, the healthier it will be. For instance, stone by its own nature doesn’t gas off any particles into the air as it’s breaking down. It’s an inert material. On the other side, a piece of PVC pipe which is a byproduct of petrochemicals is not inert. It breaks down in the environment just like a plant breaks down, and as it breaks down it floats up into the air all these little gas bubbles, and gasses off these petrochemicals products into the air. People actually ingest those as they breathe and if you are allergic to them you will have a reaction to them.

To get well again, a person with MSC needs to do everything they can to make a home out of materials with the lowest possible reactivity potential. By living in an environment that is as inert as possible an MCS person can rebuild their immune system. After moving into a non toxic home, the first six months can be a little dicey. It’s common to have a bit of reaction. I’m now at the point where most of the parts of this house are just fine for me. Had we not done all we could to build so carefully, I would permanently be reacting. If we just built a normal house I wouldn’t have been able to stay.

THE SYMPTOMS

It took almost two years to understand I had MCS. At first we thought it was a sinus allergy because my first symptom was just horrific sinus headaches, just excruciating. I went to see an allergist and started on a whole regimen but nothing changed much. The headaches reduced but other symptoms became more pronounced. I kept looking for answers and finally read about sick building syndrome over at a school on Bainbridge Island. Through that I learned the name of a doctor. I made an appointment with him and started on a new regimen.

STARTING OVER

I was desperately looking for some place to go while I was, what they call, detoxed from the chemical overload. Trying to initially get some of my chemical load down wasn’t working in Seattle. Whidbey Island had wonderful clean air and no established toxic industry so I rented a place. I really was terribly unwell at that time, much worse than I am now. Even though it was hard to get out of bed every morning, it still was wonderful being up here. Everyday, rain or shine, I would bundle up and go out when the tide was out and walk down a long beach. That helped enormously. By the time I was there for four months we just knew if we were going to build a new non-toxic home this would be the place.

THE ARCHITECT

I made it my mission to research everything as much as possible about how we could get this thing done and who could help us. It was a very circuitous journey finding the right architect.

In the process of looking for the right architect and talking to various people in this business I found out that there was quite a philosophical and, I think knowledge based difference between people who were devoting themselves to Multiple Chemical Sensitivity construction issues and people who were devoted to ecological conservation issues.

They would like to think that the issues they deal with in conservation construction, ipso-facto help the MCS situation but in many cases the materials they use are quite toxic to MCS people because they’re recycled, or have additives. Eventually I was referred to an interior designer in the Seattle area who had MCS herself and taught at Cornish with Debrah Walker, a local architect.

We interviewed Debrah and even though she hadn’t actually built an MCS project yet, there was just that immediate sensibility coming from her. She was a historical preservationist, had a strong sensibility about toxicity and she had a natural sensitivity to the whole issue. That encouraged me a lot and also in talking with Debrah I realized that she actually listens to her client. Debrah was different –markedly-- from many of the architects we spoke to.

In my situation I had to be extremely alert to whomever I was working with, and their ability to hear and understand what my concerns were. It was really a critical health issue for me. With Debrah that ability to take in, understand, appreciate where the other person is coming from and incorporate it into her spatial skill set for the design was really critical. Then we looked at some of her projects and they looked wonderful. She obviously did pay attention to detail and we were impressed by the body of work that she had done. We knew that she was a single person office, who worked with consultants, and that gave us some pause because we weren’t sure the scale of this project could be done easily by a one person office. But all the other skills she brought outweighed it. It proved to be a good decision.

THE CONTRACTOR

Debrah and I and my husband had conversations with several different contractors. We went through a whole series of questions that we had pre-prepared: the constraints that they would be under, the criteria they were going to have to meet in the construction, and the knowledge they were going to have to have about MCS and the construction methods. That selection process was difficult because it became clear that in this area at the time, there wasn’t anybody who had ever done an MCS project like this one before. We made a choice to go with Jerry Fulks and Company, a very reputable firm from Seattle, who had a very high quality construction methodology, and beautiful work. They had not yet done this kind of specific MCS work but they were intensely interested in it. Through a process of interviewing them we came to understand that they were good listeners--the same kind of criteria that Debrah met.

THE PROCESS

Debrah really dedicated herself to learning an entire body of knowledge.

Once we got started Debrah spent hours and hours and really invested her time in doing the research required by this project. She and I in fact, were like two kindred souls for that research period. I needed to know as much as she needed to know and we looked at it as a total team effort. She would refer information to me and I would refer information to her.

As we went through the design, before we did anything on the ground, we went through every step and wrote down exactly what products we were going to use. I would test to see if I would react to these products or materials. In my situation I used a kinesiology expert and used a muscle test. If it tested negative for me then we would commit it to the specs. This process took months and months before we even got to construction. Simultaneously Debrah was designing and writing the specs and as materials changed she would refit them. It’s in the details you find out exactly what products you can use to make that design happen for an MCS person.

This process took a lot of patience especially during construction. The most challenging part for me was the length of the project and the inevitable frustrations. We would have a meeting every week up here, it would be quite early in the morning and during the winter it’d be dark and quite cold. There were times when it was excruciatingly frustrating because we’d try something and it wasn’t going to work, but I have to give the contractor and the whole team tremendous credit in that they were willing and able to work this until they got it right. One of the things that seemed so miraculous and so relieving as we continued to work together is that Debrah has such an ability to step back and say well okay, now we need to think about this and yeah, that’s a disappointment but you know we’re gonna look for another avenue. She really has that ability to stay very calm, and fortunately so did Drew Giblin, the project manager from JFCo. Which made this a very good team. The critical analysis that Drew brought to this project in discussing every little detail was also a true gift to us. He had a very good ability to say okay this has happened here's what are we going to do now. I was continually impressed with both of them. There were times when everybody got frustrated but we were able to continue working through it which was wonderful.

If I were to build any thing in the future I would definitely work with Debrah again. She now has this incredible base of knowledge. She understands exactly what has to happen and she thinks through the inevitable questions that are going to arise.