Tips For Building A Healthy Family Home

This is an Aprilaire sponsored post.

In the past 20 years, we have built two homes. We were total newbies when we built the first home and there were a lot of things we would have done differently. Fortunately, a few years later we had the opportunity to do those different things. This time we wanted to build a healthy family home.

Because we had young growing kids, we thought a lot about building a healthy house.

We have cats, dogs, allergies, extremely dry skin, autoimmune diseases, asthma, and six people to consider when building a healthy family home. A house isn’t going to cure you, but you don’t want your home to make you sicker.

Building A Healthy Family Home

Since most of us don’t build many homes in our lifetime, it’s best to learn for others. Having gone through this process twice, I do have some tips for building a healthy family home.

Talk to your builder or contractor

When building a home, there are basic options and then a HUGE folder filled with all the other options available. Tell your builder that you want to see the options for building a healthy family house. I’m sure they have a section in that large folder with lots of those add-ons.

Talk with your doctor

If anyone in your family has specific allergies or other chronic or long-term issues, talk with their doctor about changes you can make in your home. The doctor will often know what options are available to help in their specialty of medicine.

Think about the air in your new house

Air is something we usually don’t think about. It’s there and we breathe it. But how clean is the air in your home?

You would think that in a brand new home, the air would be very clean, but there is a lot of dust that is created during the building process. Your home is exposed to the elements before it is completely closed. All of this affects the air in your home.

The first few years we were in our home, there was still a lot of building going on around our home. The building dust was all over my house and definitely affected the air quality. Having a whole home purifier in our home would have made a huge difference in the quality of the air we were breathing.

We put a humidifier on our main furnace when we built our second house. I was tired of dry scratchy throats all winter. That first winter after we were in our new home, we noticed the difference. Our eyes weren’t as dry, our skin was not so scratchy and generally, we felt better.

That was the first time I realized the importance of the quality of the air in my family’s home.

Not Sure Where To Start?

If you are not sure where to start, these are the healthy air quality options I would consider adding to your new home when building:

• Whole home humidifier and dehumidifier
• Whole home air purifiers
• Ventilation system
• Smart Wi-Fi thermostat

Have you built a home? What options did you add to build a healthy family home? 

Next week, I will share my experience with making changes to your existing home to be sure you are living in a healthy house.

Disclosure: This is an Aprilaire sponsored post. I was compensated for this post. All opinions are 100% my own.