Allergy prompted all-natural home

[attach]4764[/attach]Achooo! Sneezing, sniffling and coughing characterized Karen Savage’s day-to-day interactions with the environment.

And it wasn’t even allergy season.

Turns out Karen Savage, a real estate agent, wasn’t allergic to ragweed or pollen, but to her indoor environment. The real culprits were the synthetic carpets in her condo.

“Prior to living in a green home, I would cough all the time,” she said. “When I moved out my asthma disappeared.”

To reduce her allergies, Savage decided to go green.

She now only has 100 percent wool rugs in her Yorkville home.

Savage said she became aware of her allergies after returning home from visiting her parents.

[attach]4765[/attach]“In my parents’ home I wouldn’t cough,” she said. “Because they had natural wood floors.”

Savage said that even before her allergies she had always wanted a green home. She has fond memories of her childhood summers spent at the family’s lake cottage. She said at an early age her parents instilled in her a sense of environmentalism.

“We were taught to never litter … and to protect the lake,” she said.

Besides the clout of her parents, Savage also credits her grandparents’ faith in everything à la naturale. Her grandmother would always treat her with natural herbs. She recalls being treated for a cold with dry mustard seeds and flowers that her grandmother had grinded into a paste.

“She’d place it on my chest and heal me with it,” she said.

Today, Savage’s home reflects her parents’ and grandparents’ legacy. Her house is free of all synthetics. It’s an allergy-free and eco-friendly house.

Builder Paul Caverly, the owner of MyHaven Greenvision Homes, designed Savage’s eco-house. He said the semi-detached structure was built using reclaimed heritage brick from an old house in Toronto.

“Using local and recycled brick saves on carbon from fuel and transportation … and saves the brick from going to the landfill,” he said.

Most of the house was assembled from local materials to reduce the home’s carbon footprint. The kitchen cabinets are made from local North American red cherry wood, which, said Caverly, has an extremely long lifespan.

In addition, beech wood floors make up the rest of the house. Caverly said natural wood ages gracefully and requires minimal maintenance compared to engineered floors, which often only carry a thin layer of real wood on top and eventually wear out.

But above all, tight insulation plays a more pivotal role in reducing a home’s energy use, he said. To avoid heat loss both the exterior and the interior walls were insulated.

“We added insulation above the requirement of the building code,” he said.

Furthermore, to maximize the use of natural light, Caverly installed skylights into the ceilings of the house. One is deliberately positioned above the open-tread stairs to allow them to scatter the light and reach the living room and hallway.

The other skylights are located in Savage’s bedroom and bathroom. The skylights not only introduce plenty of light into the house, but also have a cooling and heating effect. Savage said she shades the windows in the summer to allow for a cooling effect and leaves them open during the winter to allow the sun to heat her room.

Caverly said it would have been ideal to install a skylight at the front of the house, but the building’s heritage designation didn’t permit it.

He also installed ample windows to the front and rear of the house to let more natural light in.

“The windows are better insulated because the frames are all wood,” he said.

Other green features include energy efficient appliances and furnace, a natural stone patio that acts as a filter and allows water to escape back into the ground instead of runoff entering the city’s sewers, a low maintenance polished concrete floor in the basement and durable shingles.

The shingles, for example, come with a lifespan of 40 years as opposed to the shingles on the average house in Toronto, which have only half the lifespan, depending on the roof’s ventilation system.

The builder said Savage saves an average of 30 to 40 percent in energy compared to other 170 square metre homes in the city.

While Savage understands that greening a home can be costly, she said the long-term benefits outweigh the initial investment.

“It might cost more at the beginning but in the long run there are many benefits,” she said. “Lower energy bills, longer life, better health and preserving the environment.”