It’s time for a change – and a new kitchen can be a great way to give your home a serious spring spruce-up, and make it healthier, too.

But if you or someone in your family has allergies and asthma, there are important steps you need to take.

The Demolition

It’s great to get older (and likely more toxic) materials out of your kitchen – but it’s crucial that you do it carefully.

The first step is to mitigate the demolition dust, which can contain chemicals, molds and other irritants, says Eric Corey Freed, principal with San Francisco’s organicARCHITECT and author of Green Building & Remodeling for Dummies. In order to keep dust from spreading, tightly seal off the area with plastic sheeting. It’s also worth picking up some hairnet-like covers for your air ducts to keep the dust from being recirculated.

Everyone working in the area also needs to wear protective goggles and a ventilating mask. “Guys tend to say, ‘I don’t need that, it’s just a little dust.’ But it adds up,” says Freed. “And it’s not just the heavy dust that you can see – it’s all the fine particulate that you can’t see that you inhale.” (Freed also stresses that if you suspect there is asbestos or lead paint, you need to bring in the pros to do the demo work.)

Mold can also present a serious problem because moisture often gathers behind sink cabinets, creating the perfect place for mold to breed and set off allergy symptoms during and after a renovation.

“Many owners see mold, spray bleach on it and think it’s fixed,” says Freed. Not so: the affected area must be completely dried out – or the drywall replaced – to ensure it doesn’t grow back. Once the demolition is complete, wet-mop to capture remaining dirt and dust, then flush the space with fresh air before that new kitchen rolls in.

Next Page: Choosing the right cabinets plus ‘cured’ counters that don’t off-gas.

DECORATING

1. Scented Candles
The thought of cinnamon or vanilla wafting through the house may appeal, but scented candles smell of big trouble for those with allergies or chemical sensitivities.

“People who have environmental allergies such as to pollen or pets develop very sensitive inflamed nasal tissue which is hyper-reactive,” explains Ottawa allergist Dr. Antony Ham Pong. “These tissues then react more strongly to scents, and act as if they are allergens and mimic an allergic reaction.”

Plus, consider whether soy-allergic guests will be visiting before you light up that soy wax candle. While most are made from hydrogenated oil, which won’t cause an inhalant reaction, your soy-allergic guest or her child may feel uncomfortable knowing that a soy product is wafting through the air.

Advice: Use unscented, beeswax candles or opt instead for trendy fairy light strings for table décor or wreaths.

2. Festive Spores
If you have environmental allergies, a pine or cedar dominating the living room can bring you to sneezes and tears (or worse). Allergists warn at this time of year about “Rudolph the Reindeer Syndrome,” literally a reaction to the Christmas tree.

“Allergic reactions can occur to any pollen from the pine cones, or to mold in the bark of the tree,” Dr. Ham Pong notes. He says the tree’s resin can also cause “either eczema from contact with the skin, or nasal symptoms due to the scent.”

Mold is the biggest issue – some studies suggest household mold counts can increase as much as 10 times with a cut tree in the home. But an artificial tree can also harbor mold if it was stored in a damp basement.

Advice: Reduce the allergen load of a fresh-cut tree with a good blow-out – either taking it home on the roof of your car or subjecting it to a leaf blower on your front lawn. This gets rid of pollen grains and some mold. If mold is an asthma trigger, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America additionally suggests wiping around the tree’s trunk with a solution of 1 part bleach to 20 parts of lukewarm water. Also, wear gloves when moving a tree or boughs to avoid contact with the sap.

Or: Opt instead for a nice faux tree. Just be sure to enclose it plastic post-season, and store it in a dry spot.

3. Up in Smoke
Watch out for a roaring wood fire when visiting. As Certified Asthma Educator Jo-Anne St. Vincent has explained in Allergic Living magazine, that can expose those with asthma or allergies to a variety of environmental triggers, including smoke and mold.

If visiting friends in a home with a trendy enclosed gas fireplace, that’s a safer bet. But even then don’t linger close by. Vincent says gas-burning fireplaces still emit nitrogen oxide, which can increase inflammation of the airways.

While manufactured fireplace logs used to be infamous for off-gassing toxic chemicals (since industrial waste was part of their composition), today these logs are much more environmentally friendly. There are still two problems though from an allergy/asthma perspective:

a) smoke, no matter how “green” still irritates sensitive airways.
b) Nut allergy concerns. Several brands make “crackling” fire logs, and they use walnut or other nut shells to achieve the sound while burning. It’s wise to avoid putting such proteins into the air around a nut-allergic individual.

Advice: Best of all is to ask close family to forego the fire in the living room, if that’s to be the main party room.

Next: Gift Giving, Food and Drink Tips

These are all tell-tale signs of household molds – fungi that thrive in a humid environment.

This microscopic fungus is not something you want to be living with. It produces allergens, irritants and, sometimes, mycotoxins (a toxic substance that you can inhale).

When it reproduces, mold releases spores that can trigger hay fever reactions and asthma attacks in the mold-allergic. Even those who aren’t allergic can find themselves rubbing their eyes, nursing a skin rash or suffering from a sore throat.

If mold is growing in your house, it’s time to identify the problem and eliminate it.

Spotting It

To determine whether you’ve got mold, there are clues to look for, says Frank Haverkate, an indoor environmental consultant and president of Haverkate and Associates Inc., a Toronto-based environmental testing and consulting company that does mold inspections.

Mold needs moisture to grow, so any source of water that is not contained – such as condensation on your walls or leaky pipes – combined with a lack of airflow, can create perfect conditions for the fungi.

Haverkate suggests looking for peeling and cracking paint, flaking and powdery plaster, and crystalline white formations on the basement foundation that indicate minerals are passing through the stone.

Mold can be furry, powdery, slimy and come in a variety of colours, from black to green to white. In fact, says Haverkate, despite rumours that black mold is the worst for your health, all molds can cause problems. You can’t judge toxicity by the colour.

Companies such as Haverkate’s specialize in mold inspection. For $1,000 to $1,500, he will come to your house with instruments including moisture meters and thermal imaging cameras to suss out the problem and also do lab analyses of air samples.

The firm is one of the few in Canada to use a mold-sniffing dog to help identify hard-to-see cases. (Mold Dogs Inc. in Alberta and MoldDOG Canada in Port Coquitlam, B.C. employ dogs on the job as well.)

The Cleanup

The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. suggests only small areas (no more than three patches of mold, each smaller than one square metre) should be tackled by an untrained individual.

If that’s your situation, protect yourself by purchasing an N-95 respirator that fits properly so you don’t inhale any spores. Wear gloves that come up your forearm as well as goggles without ventilation holes. Using detergent and water, scrub off the mold.

(Do not use bleach as it can react with surface materials and produce toxic gases.) Dry the area completely and make sure it stays arid.

For more serious mold infestations, you’ll need to call in a specialized mold removal contractor, with credentials from the Institution of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC) and the Indoor Air Quality Association (IAQA).

Such contractors will set up a tent-like structure around the mold, which they pressurize before safely removing the fungi, so that isn’t spread around. Haverkate advises that mold inspectors who also do the removal have an inherent conflict of interest.

How To Avoid

There are simple steps to minimize your exposure to mold. Fix any leaks immediately; keep your eavestroughs clear of leaves, so that they drain properly; turn a fan on in the bathroom for 10 minutes after every shower or bath; make sure appliances, such as dryers, are vented properly; and cover cold surfaces, including cold water pipes, with insulation so that condensation doesn’t accumulate.

If you do have a flood or a leak, clean it up quickly. Chances are that if you remove the moisture within 24 to 48 hours, you will stop mold spores from setting up camp. While Haverkate stresses that a mold-free environment does not exist, an infestation in your home is unhealthy and should be eradicated.

Websites of Interest

CMHC page
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention page

Inside, mold thrives in humid areas like the shower or the basement. Outside, you’ll find it growing in shady areas where there is dampness or where vegetation is decomposing.

Mold reproduces by sending out tiny spores that float through the air, looking for a friendly environment to make a home. These spores are resilient and can survive in even the driest conditions.

When the spores do find dampness, mold is extremely fast-growing, and so plentiful that we don’t even know how many species there are.

Estimates suggest there are between 10,000 and 300,000 different kinds. And not all are bad for humans. We use mold in food production to make cheese and soy sauce. But unless you’re making your own Danish blue, you will want to banish mold from your home.

See Also:

• Find and destroy mold in the home.

As a kid, Michele Chase had severe asthma attacks, which her family put down to the polluted air in Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto. But when, at the age of 10, she moved with her family to Fredericton, New Brunswick, a city with a population of only 50,000, Chase’s bouts of asthma surprisingly did not improve.

Her chest would become tight and she’d wheeze so hard she couldn’t catch a breath, despite a daily course of medication. Her family became acquainted with the local ER department.

But there was a difference in Fredericton: many of her asthma flareups started within the family home. For years, she couldn’t figure out the exact trigger. But Chase, now 28, today is certain she knows the spark for her childhood agony.

Asthma attacks triggered by home’s poor indoor air

Three years ago she helped her mother renovate the family home. As they were replacing the gyprock and paneling in the basement, they made an unsettling discovery. Thick, oozing black fungus had completely covered the back side of the gyprock and had permeated the insulation.

While they knew the basement was always damp, they had been completely unaware of the health hazard hidden behind the walls. Chase is thankful her bedroom was not in the basement, but notes, “if it’s in the home, it’s still in what you breathe.”

In Ottawa, Susan Clemens can relate. She watched with increasing distress as Angela,* her young daughter, suffered frightening asthma attacks between the years 2002 and 2004. The family was living in a “maisonette” with 12 apartments connected to a central hallway.

The building’s owners were busily renovating units, and every time a tenant moved out, they would resurface the floor in the vacated unit. Chemical fumes permeated the building, and the Clemens’ immediate neighbour was a smoker, so the family was also breathing in second-hand smoke.

Angela was not a wheezer, but during attacks the skin between the toddler’s ribs and collarbone would suck in as she struggled to breathe. Her lips would turn blue, and she’d break into a sweat. Angela was diagnosed with asthma at 12 months, but didn’t see a respirologist until she was 3.

He questioned Clemens and her husband about their lifestyle. When they explained about the apartment renovations, he immediately connected that to their daughter’s health. “That’s one of your big problems,” she recalls him saying. And then the life-changing words: “You have to move.”

How a home’s indoor air can cause allergies and asthma

Such instances are far from unique. While most North Americans still think of smog as the most serious form of air pollution, a more toxic chemical stew is often found in the air we breathe inside our homes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency labels indoor air one of the Top Five environmental health risks, up there with polluted drinking water.

The bad environment in our households starts with polluted air from the outdoors, which is often not cycled effectively in and out of tightly sealed and energy-efficient homes. Trapped, “the pollutant levels may be two to five times higher inside than outside, and in some cases, 100 times higher,” says Tom Kelly, director of the EPA’s Indoor Environments Division.

Then the homeowners mix in other chemicals: pesticides, perhaps cigarette smoke, air fresheners, hairspray, perfume and cleaning supplies. Thrown into the invisible concoction are the gases given off by furnishings or paint. Add animal dander, dust mites and mold – those ubiquitous biological allergy triggers – and suddenly there’s new meaning to the term “the fresh outdoors.”

Who is harmed by indoor air pollution?

Polluted indoor air “can be a very high risk for children, for elderly people, and for folks with diseases such as asthma,” says Kelly. In Canada, asthma is responsible for 10 per cent of all hospital admissions for children under the age of 4. The thought that our homes, our safe havens, can at times be to blame, is sobering.

To get a reading on just how bad household air is becoming a company that designs indoor air monitors, AirAdvice, worked with a network of heating, air conditioning, and air quality professionals to collect and analyze about 1.3 billion air samples from nearly 50,000 homes in the U.S. and Canada between 2004 and 2006.

Its survey showed 96.7 per cent of the homes generating an “alert”, that is, a level outside the recommended range for one of: particle allergens (dust, dander and pollen); chemical pollutants; carbon dioxide; temperature; humidity; and carbon monoxide. Eighty-three per cent of the homes had two or more alerts.