I just read a blog by Anaphylaxing on Housing Rental for the Chemically Sensitive. In her post (http://mastcellactivation.blogspot.com/2013/01/house-rental-for-chemically-sensitive.html?showComment=1357836487912#c5550117704868306674) she lists 14 points that must be met when renting a home to be safe for her. I find that the same points also apply when looking to buy a home.
My husband built my safe home in 2003 while I spent most of that year in Dallas at the Environmental Health Center-Dallas. My medical bills were racking up pretty quickly and I was in a fight for my life and a fight with workers’ compensation. The only option we had was to build on a lot that we had purchased many years before. I am doing great in my home but this isn’t the place where I want to be forever. The neighborhood is not the greatest and seems to be deteriorating some. I miss my old house with its 2500 square feet of spaciousness and the acre and a half lot it was on.
We have talked a lot about buying a home somewhere else and renovating it to fit my needs. The first house I was going to actively look at was a disaster. We me the realtor on the yard in front of the porch. I told her that if I detected anything when the door was opened, we wouldn’t be interested. She opened the door and I immediately got hoarse, had chest pain and got that tremor feeling I get with mold. I told her there was mold in there and my husband wouldn’t be going in either. She said well there is a smell but I am not sure what it is. My husband replied that if I said there was mold, there was mold. She then asked a realtor that had just been in the house who said there was a little in the master bathroom at the back of the house. As any of you know who have been around mold or know about mold, it would take more than a little in the master bathroom at the far end of the house for me to have a reaction when the front door opened.
My husband and I tried again recently. As soon as we got to the front door the odor of candles and air fresheners hit me like a ton of bricks and I began coughing up a lung. I let him quickly walk in but told him that again the house would have to be gutted to make it safe for me (new sheet rock, carpet removed, tile/grout replaced and the hvac ducting at the very least would have to be replaced. The housing market has started climbing here again and the chances of getting a house priced so that we could afford to almost gut it is very unlikely. Our only real chance to get to a different area would be to buy acreage and build again. This is something my husband does not want to do and something I don’t want him to have to do although starting from scratch is easier than removing and replacing.
It looks like I am not going anywhere anytime soon.