Recently I’ve had a few patients who expressed concern about moving. Moving can be anxiety-provoking for those who have environmental or multiple chemical sensitivities, because landlords (bless their hearts!) try to make apartments and homes look fresh and updated for their new residents, but (damn their eyes!) they use the cheapest, smelliest paints, flooring, and carpets known to mankind!
The last time I moved, my landlord very generously put in a new (faux) wood floor, painted the whole place, and put in new fixtures in the kitchen and bathroom. Yay! Right? No! BOO! A couple of weeks after I moved, the floor started off-gassing the most atrocious chemicals, and I was sick for weeks.
So what’s a sensitive person to do??
Well, the good news is that there are some relatively easy solutions. Regardless of what could be off-gassing in your new place—flooring, carpeting, whatever—you can quickly and inexpensively do a couple of things that can help a lot.
Let’s start with paint. Regular paint is super-smelly, and tends to off-gas for much longer than people realize. Furthermore, the stuff it off-gasses, called VOC (which stands for volatile organic compounds) is unbelievably toxic—not as toxic as having a running automobile in your living room, granted, but not that far behind. Luckily, there is a type of paint you can buy called Low VOC. Low VOC paint (available in stores like Sherwin Williams and Benjamin Moore) will not only release far fewer toxins in the air, but it will also help absorb odors from other sources in your home. So if you had new carpet, painting the walls would actually absorb some of the toxic off-gassing from the carpet too. Low VOC paint is a little more expensive than regular paint, but not that much more. And if you’re on a really tight budget, one alternative would be to just paint one wall instead of all four.
If you would like more information on Low VOC paint, here’s a link that I found to be very informative:
The other thing that will help tremendously is an air purifier. Especially when you can’t open the windows (because it’s too cold or hot outside), having a good air purifier can make breathing a lot easier. The one thing I found was to beware of air purifiers that said they released ozone (like that was a good thing—because it’s not!)—ozone is one of the things released by paint that you’re trying to remove, and it’s why you are getting the air purifier in the first place.
Here’s a link to an informative web page about air purifiers:
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