New Healthy Home and Southern Comfort

From the Owners of a New Healthy Home:

“We were absolutely thrilled with every aspect of our engagement with HBS during our recent new home build. From the outset, HBS did a wonderful job assessing what was important to us from a healthy living space perspective. They helped ensure that those concepts and objectives were translated into specific evaluation of materials and processes used in our build in a timely fashion. They consistently applied a tempered, balanced, and collaborative approach to our contractor when tradeoffs and accommodations had to be made. HBS also made the science (their expertise) accessible to us, explaining key factors in an understandable way. Lastly, and equally important, the team was always available to us and very professionally organized, turning around one-off requests immediately, aggregating all decisions in a single, consolidated document. In all, we were very impressed with the whole team, knowledge, level of engagement, and value added to our new healthy home.”

Happy, New Healthy Homeowners

New Healthy Home – Summary

A gorgeous site was selected for this home just beyond the hustle and bustle of Memphis, Tennessee. Homeowners were concerned about all things environmental, but initially wanted to pay particular attention to VOCs, aldehydes (“formaldehyde“), and electromagnetic fields (EMF). The project fell under our Green Building Consulting Department services of Healthy Building Materials Consulting and Building Biology Environmental Consulting.

Southern Comfort Healthy Home – Process

Owner completed an intake survey from Healthy Building Science. Our survey helped define the owner’s goals for sustainability and laid groundwork for how sustainability questions would be answered by the design-build team along with the review and approval of materials. The contractor followed best practices for managing indoor air quality during construction; natural, low VOC finishes were specified throughout and low EMF wiring and design practices helped ensure low occupant exposure. Special care was given to sleeping and other high use areas. Ventilation and air and water filtration were equally important. Ultimately, the contractors learned many new best practices and the owners were happy their new home didn’t have that “new car smell”.