Meg is a City of Chicago fireman and she has no problem using the masculine form of the word.  Firefighting is tough, physical work.  It requires strength, quick thinking, and a willingness to put yourself in harm’s way.  A lot of people are not physically or mentally up to the job.  I know Meg is.  I like to say that the City is a safer place when Meg is on the job.

And maybe precisely because Meg is so darn good at what she does, I don’t always take fire safety as serious as I should around our home.  I used to for instance, pooh pooh the warnings we hear from the fire department about having working smoke detectors and replacing their batteries on a regular basis.  After all I thought, how long would it take for me or anyone else in my family to get out of the house in case of fire?  And really, how quickly could a home fire spread and wouldn’t we have plenty of time to evacuate our home in the very unlikely event of a home fire and battery-dead smoke alarm?

That all changed a number of years ago when I first saw a video produced by Underwriters Laboratory entitled “Comparison of Modern and Legacy Home Furnishings“.   It is 5 minutes and 32 seconds long and worth watching every second.  This video not only opens your eyes to the relative few seconds it takes for a modern home to go up in flames, it also opens your eyes to the amount of chemicals inside our homes.

In a nutshell, the video shows a living room from 50 years ago filled with household items that were common place in the 50s and 60s and compares it to an identical living room arranged with furnishings and finishes of a modern day home.  A fire was started in both rooms and the results are shown.

What the video makes clear is that most of us are literally sitting in a toxic stew of chemicals.  They are used to treat the couch we lay on to watch TV, to finish the floors we walk on, to paint the walls that surround us, and to “fireproof” that mattress we sleep on.  This video is eye-opening and should make us think twice about the relative safety of our interior environments.

By the way, UL is a phenomenal Chicago based company, one that has been around for over 100 years.  Our world is indeed safer because of their day-to-day work.

So please watch the video and tell me if this doesn’t affect you like it did me the first time I saw it.  We’ll come back to this video from time to time to talk about specific things one can do to make your home a safer, healthier place for you and your family.

I am working on 2 or 3 healthy home/ blog articles that are not quite ready to post.  I will complete at least one of them tonight after finishing my natural food gig that starts in about an hour.

In the mean time, if you are serious about learning more about how to keep your home free from chemicals and toxins, a good place to start is Mother Earth Living magazine.  Started originally as Natural Home & Garden magazine, I was a subscriber for seven or eight years back in the day.  It morphed into Mother Earth Living about six years ago when Ogden Publications rebranded the whole thing and expanded its focus from beyond building new homes from alternative materials and solar power to helping eco-conscious consumers learn how to live a more healthy lifestyle with greater coverage of natural food, decorating, gardening and remodeling.

Here is a link to subscribe:

https://www.motherearthliving.com/store/offer/EMLEMI6X?utm_source=wcemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MEL%20C_04.23.18%20MEL%20EXP&utm_term=MEL_PromotionsMEL%20Circ%20Expires&_wcsid=028091CBD11F626EA708575D7F980E2C9AEEAFEC500A26C8

Please visit that link and consider subscribing or at least going to there web site to see if it makes sense for you and your family.

I’ve been a subscriber to Mother Earth News for almost as long.  Mother Earth News covers some of the same material but with a much greater focus on those who want to be self-reliant and who have a desire to live totally of the grid.  It’s full of interesting articles, but for this audience, MEL is a better source of day-to-day advice on how you can begin to transform your home from one that is toxic to one that is more nurturing and healthful.

In the last few weeks, my wife and I decided to reupholster a couple pieces of furniture  around our home and that made me remember a link to an Underwriters Laboratory video that I first saw after it was first produced almost a decade ago that dramatically changed my idea of what a healthy home was.  My next post will be about that video, so stay tuned.

Most future discussions on this blog are benefited by knowing a bit about a field of study known as bau biology.   Bau-Biologie translated from the German is “building biology” or “building for life”.  The focus of Building Biology is on human health, and its study arose in the 1960s when the declining health of occupants living in post WWII homes was first observed–structures built for the first time using primarily petrochemical materials.

There are two critical Principles that underpin bau biology:

1.  Balance–when synthetic materials and made-made pollutants and electromagnetic frequencies are introduced into our homes, our natural balance with the environment is lost and health detrimentally impacted; and
2. Nature–is the gold standard against which our built environments must be measured and offers us the best examples of how to create safe and healthy living environments.

I like to summarize it like this:

Bau Biology is the holistic study of our man-made environment and the consequent impact on human health and ecology.  Bau biologists apply their knowledge to the construction of natural homes and workplaces and believe that buildings can and must abide by the laws of nature to optimally serve their occupants.  Bau biologists view home as “an organism that interacts with the natural environment” and belief that home “should be a place of deep rest and recuperation.”

If your home is not such a place, or if you suspect that perhaps it is not, then please keep reading this blog as we drill down into the principles that underlie this field of study and show you how to make your home a more peaceful, nurturing  place to live.

In the mean time, here is where you can learn more and find bau biologists who practice in your area.  Frankly, the chicago area has a dearth of practicing bau biologists compared to elsewhere around the country, but there are a handful of people doing this work and I know all of them, including Mieke Jacobs who contributes to this blog.

I am looking forward to posting more this next week with a lot more practical advice on how you can make your home healthier, and how we should be defining a healthy home, so stay tuned.

When I first moved to Chicago 30 years ago I met a friend of a friend who liked to go smelt fishing.  For those who don’t know the details, smelting takes place starting April 1 here in Chicago and consists of primarily hauling a very large net (and a few cases of beer) to the shore of Lake Michigan, dropping the net into the water, and checking every so often to see if any smelt have found their way into your net.

It’s nothing like trout fishing or fly fishing, and it never requires a boat to get away from shore.  All that is required as i said is a large net and the willingness to wait.  With the right company and the right drinking beverage it is a terrific time.

But it can also be terrifically cold.  The first week of April is always dark, dank, and with any kind of breeze coming off the lake, extremely cold.  And that’s coming from a guy who grew up in Buffalo!  Hence the reason for a hot toddy to go along with that cold brewski and the heavy coat and gloves.  Trash can fires are par for the course, and back in the day when the smelt used to really run, you’d see a string of trash can fires burning along the lakefront during that first week of April.

Now I mention my smelting experience because the weather around Chicago this Spring has felt like smelting season for almost all of April, May, and June.  We had two measurable snow falls in April, lots of rain and cold in May, and even June has yet to feel like summer.  Until today.

So with the temperatures going into the 90s today and setting a record on Father’s Day tomorrow, and it finally beginning to feel like summer around here, I thought it time to talk about sunscreens.

One of the things that got me most interested in healthy homes and living a healthy lifestyle was when I first learned the truth about most sunscreens after reading an article about them 12 or 13 years ago.  Sunscreens have to be good for you right?  Well, actually, maybe not.  I was shocked to learn that many are filled with chemicals and I would stray from calling most of them ‘healthy’.

So first assignment for those who want to live a healthier lifestyle this summer, go to the Environmental Working Group home page and spend time getting to know them and their annual guide to sunscreens.  I found out about this group exactly 12 years ago as they were preparing their first guide and been recommending it to clients every year since.

A healthy home begins by putting healthy things in our mouth and on our skin and EWG’s sunscreen guide is a must read for you and your family.

Gotta run off to my organic food job.  Another post tomorrow I hope, and more frequent posts over this next week as I finish setting my garden and my kids finish school.

Happy sunbathing everyone!! and if you are at Welles Park this summer say hi to my lifeguarding daughter Yulia.

I was sitting at my kitchen breakfast bar a couple weeks ago thinking about the best way to get people’s attention and advertise this blog.  The derivation for how this blog got its name, One Fine House, is given in an earlier post, but using that name in advertising was going to do very little I thought to communicate what content was being covered here.

I wasn’t coming up with any good ideas, and so my mind began to wander and my eyes glanced over to our kitchen bookshelf, crammed full of mostly worn, food-stained cookbook titles.  My collection includes some tried and true titles like The Fannie Farmer Baking Book (Cunningham), some restaurant- based books like my favorite The Frog/ Commissary Cookbook (Poses, et. al), and some classics like The Joy of Cooking (Rombauer) or Moosewood Cookbook (Katzen).  I genuinely love our collection of cookbooks and cooking reference books and genuinely wish I had room for more.

Anyway, smack dab in the middle of the bookshelf was a book I had been conferring with the night before and I noted was a bit out-of-place as I had hastily returned it to the shelf.  This particular book was a game-changing reference book when it was first published back in August 1987 and to this day continues to be the seminal source of information on the topic.  Entitled Fats that Heal. Fats that Kill, this book is Udo Erasmus’ treatise on how eating the right fats and oils can actually help heal the body and improve human health and longevity, just like the homes I hope to develop someday.

Moreover, Erasmus’ book flew in the face of conventional thinking at a time when it was considered that ALL fats were bad and man-made products like margarine were better for your health.  Similarly, there will be times when this blog flies in the face of ‘conventional wisdom’ and offers ideas that buck conventional thinking and you may reject at first blush.  But stick with me here and let’s take some time to see where our investigations take us.

So who would have thunk it…..the best headline for publicizing One Fine House’s content and for building some brand name recognition was starring me in the face.  Simply delete the word ‘Fats’ from Erasmus’ title and substitute with the word ‘Homes” and voila, we got ourselves a headline that grabs your attention and strongly communicates what this blog is all about: Homes that Heal. Homes that Kill.

An organization dedicated to this concept and to human health and the study of our built environment is the International Institute for Building Biology & Ecology.  If you are looking for someone to advise on how healthy your home actually is and for advice on the things you can do to make it healthier, turn to these guys first.

More on them in an upcoming post.