Episode 01: What is a Healthy Home, Really? Start Here

In this debut episode, Ashley Spanovich unpacks the foundational question: What does it really mean to have a healthy home? From mold toxins to EMFs to the energy of your space, Ashley walks you through the biggest environmental threats hiding in plain sight and how to begin building a more supportive, healing space, no matter your starting point.

She offers empowering insights into the difference between baseline safety and deep nourishment, all grounded in real-world realities like budget, capacity, and personal sensitivity. Whether you're recovering from environmental illness, planning your next move, or simply curious about optimizing your space, this episode is a must-listen primer.

THINGS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Change the air foundation (Research on Mold Exposure)
• Awakening Spaces (Research on EMF exposure)
• Radon meter Ashley recommends
• Check out Branch Basics’ surfactant-based cleaners here

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Ashley helps you renovate and build healthier homes to prevent future health issues from arising from your environment. Whether you’re searching for a new home, assessing concerns with your current one, or embarking on a renovation or new build, Awakening Spaces can guide you every step of the way.

Ashley brings her background in Building Biology and Building Science and years of hands-on experience helping families reduce mold, chemical exposure, and EMFs in their living spaces. Her clients gain homes that are not only functional and beautiful, but truly support their well-being and peace of mind.

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Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 0:04

you are listening to the awakening spaces podcast a show about building homes that heal and the sacred journey within i'm your host ashley spanovich a healthy home consultant building science nerd and the founder of awakening spaces around here we're not just talking about walls windows and wiring we're also exploring how the spaces we live in shape our nervous systems our health and our sense of self whether you're building from scratch recovering from an environmental illness or just starting to question what's really in your walls we're here to help you reclaim your home as a place of deep nourishment. Let's dive in. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Awakening Spaces podcast. Today, I really wanted to start at the very beginning. Since this is our first episode, I want to make sure that we discuss what What does it mean to have a healthy home? Because having a healthy home can mean something totally different depending on who you ask. So I like to think of this the same way as I think about food. We're going to use a couple of different food analogies today, but there is a camp of people who think that being vegan and eating vegan food is the healthiest diet there is. And then there's another camp of people who think that eating carnivore is the healthiest diet there is. And a vegan and a carnivore may both be getting good results and feeling really healthy. So the same thing comes when we're talking about our homes, when we're talking about healthy homes. Healthy homes are going to mean something different to everybody. Maybe you're here because you've actually been impacted by your home. Maybe you've had some sort of mold exposure. Somebody in your family has had some sort of mold exposure. Or maybe you are working with a functional medicine practitioner who started uncovering environmental toxins in your system that made you sort of awaken to how our physical environments can actually impact our health. Or maybe you might be somebody who has experienced firsthand sensitivity from electromagnetic radiation. Either way, we all live our lives through a lens that brings us to wanting or feeling like we need a healthier home. And so that's going to look different on all of us. So it's really important to understand what are your personal goals? And that's how we treat every single client and every single project that comes in, because there are layers to having a healthy home. And again, I'm going to use another food analogy. We could feel massive improvements in our health if we simply just cut out fast food, processed sugar, and just other processed junk. Just by doing those things, we are going to feel so much better. We're probably going to have a lot more energy. We're probably going to start losing a little bit of weight. We're probably just going to start feeling better. But if we start to add in really nutrient dense ancestral whole foods into our diet and increasing our protein and going to the gym and doing these things to optimal then we are really going to feel a great improvement in our health. We're going to be optimized. However, we might not need to do that to feel good. Some people might just feel really good by eating a whole food diet and avoiding all the processed junk and sugar where some people might feel their best by going above and beyond and optimizing their health and adding in much more nourishment. So I like to look at building and renovating and maintaining our healthy homes the same way where at the very baseline, we want to at least remove that junk, those toxic threats, those things that I'll call the processed sugar and the processed food of our homes. And then once we've removed the junk and the things that are just no good for our health at all, then Then we can build in. We can add more nourishment. We can start to build on that. But I don't want people to get deterred from having a healthier home because they feel like they have to do everything perfect. They have to have all the latest and best and healthiest materials and things in it. That's just not... It's not always attainable. We have realistic budgets. We have... It's just not always attainable for people because these things do cost money. So we need to understand what is important to you and how can we do what we can to get to that baseline where everyone should be. Every home should, at a minimum, be safe and healthy for the occupants. It shouldn't be the thing that is contributing to our stress. And that is a right that everyone should have. But there's so much more that we can do to optimize our homes once we get there. So let's talk about what some of those those bigger threats are first, and then we're going to move into some of the things we can do later on to nourish. But I want to bring some awareness to some of those bigger threats that could be impacting your home that you might just not know about to make sure that our homes are at least not contributing to our disease. The very first thing, and I think this is the thing that brings a lot of people into this world, at least that was what was true for me, is finding and removing biotoxins in our home. And biotoxins are these toxic substances that are produced from living organisms like bacteria and fungi, and they can interfere with almost everything in our body. These are not just allergens. These can be very neurotoxic. They can impair cellular function. They can impair our immune systems and they can have really long lasting effects, even when we remove them from the environment. So this is, I think, first and foremost, something that if you are experiencing health issues, you want to find and remove biotoxins from your home, or at least rule out the fact that biotoxins might be playing a role in your environment. And so biotoxins can look like mycotoxins from mold. So these are the toxic compounds produced from certain molds. And the thing about mycotoxins is that they can stick to dust and other surfaces, so they can be really hard to remove. Mycotoxins have been linked to a wide range of health issues. So we definitely want to make sure that we're removing any mycotoxin producing molds from our environment. But mycotoxins and mold is not the only biotoxin that we could find in our environment. We also see beta glucans, which are the cell fragments from moles and fungi. And this is why killing mold isn't the best solution. We want to remove the mold. So if you ever hear somebody come in and say, oh, we're just going to use kills paint, or we're going to use a fogger, or we're just going to use some sort of disinfectant and we're just going to kill the mold. That's a really big red flag. It's not something that you want somebody to come into your home and do because That is not addressing mycotoxins. That's not addressing the beta glucans. That is, these things need to be removed from our environment. And we're going to go into other podcast episodes where we go into this in more detail. But for today, I really just want to shed some light on some of these things that might be impacting the environment. The other thing are endotoxins. These are going to trigger strong inflammatory responses, and this can also trigger asthma, respiratory issues, and chronic fatigue-like symptoms This endotoxin is actually a component of the outer membrane of gram negative bacteria. So we have fungus and then we have bacteria and endotoxins are part of the bacteria, bacterial issue that can happen within our home. You may have heard of actinomycetes and the byproducts of actinose. And these bacteria are often mistaken for mold because they produce this toxin that can be neurotoxic and immunosuppressive and sort of mimic the same sort of issues as microbial growth. We truly have a mold epidemic. Water is the number one enemy of our buildings and this is really the basis of our work here at Awakening Spaces because we help you renovate and build your home to minimize your risk of biotoxin exposure because it is estimated that 50% of our homes actually actually have water damage and. Not very many people take this seriously. So it's really up to you as a homeowner, as somebody who is trying to maintain a healthy home or somebody who is going to renovate or build a healthy home to really make sure that you're doing and taking every precaution to minimize that risk. Because there are thousands of studies linking mold exposure to various health issues. And we actually are going to link a resource from Change the Air Foundation in the show notes. So check out the show notes check out that resource. It's going to go into all the studies linking mold exposure to health issues, especially if you're somebody who's going through this and you're getting a lot of pushback from people or people are not really, I don't know, on your side or believe you when you start to talk about avoiding mold in your environment. The second thing I want to talk about is radon. So radon is actually a naturally occurring radioactive gas that comes from the breakdown of uranium in soil and rock. And You cannot see it. You cannot smell it. But long-term exposure to radon is actually the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking and the number one cause of lung cancer for non-smokers. This is something I'm very passionate about talking about because so many people have radon in their homes and have no idea. In fact, when I was purchasing my home, the inspector was did not require to test for radon, did not think I needed to test for radon. I urged them to test and we found that I was living in 14 picocuries per liter. Well, I hadn't been living in it yet, but I was about to be living in 14 picocuries per liter. The safe level per the EPA is four picocuries per liter. However, the WHO recommends two picocuries per liter And I personally do not think that there is, that we should be living in levels above one. So it's really important that if you haven't tested for radon that you do. And again, I'm going to link a meter below that you can use to do some long-term detection to test for radon. I think that everybody should have one of these in their homes because radon levels can fluctuate just depending on what's going on in the home. I highly recommend taking the time if you have already to measure and test for radon because it's easy, it's inexpensive, and it could be life-saving truly. And it's really not that hard to mitigate. Um, if you do find high levels of radon in your home, it can be easily taken care of for fairly inexpensive, depending, depending on what you need to do, but you know, it's, it's definitely worth doing. Um, if you VOCs and SVOCs. So VOCs stand for volatile organic compounds. You might hear the term off-gassing. That is a term used to describe that odor that you get from paints and floorings and adhesives and furniture and just different cleaning products that you might use that might be emitting a volatile organic compound or VOC. A lot of people will think that moving into a brand new home is devoid of threat. And it's not actually true because many new homes are extremely high in VOCs and SVOCs. So SVOCs are semi-volatile organic compounds. And these are going to be a little bit heavier in nature than VOCs. So these end up landing in our dust. SVOCs are commonly found in things like flame retardant, phthalates, pesticides, synthetic fragrances, so candles, PFAs, those are forever chemicals. So if you have like fabrics that have stain resistant treating on them or nonstick cookware or water repellent materials and also the vapor from cooking, that can actually settle in our dust and especially if there's not really good ventilation in the home. So We want to eliminate bringing VOCs in the home. If you're in a home already, it has VOCs. The best thing you can do is ventilate, ventilate, ventilate. Make sure you are opening the windows. Consider getting a fresh air ventilation system installed in the home and cleaning because the only way to remove those SVOCs is by physically removing them and picking them up in the dust. So cleaning with a microfiber cloth and a surfactant-based cleaner. We love Burnt Basics That's a really great non-toxic cleaner that you can use. It's surfactant based and can really help pick up and remove any of those SVOCs that are coming from the breakdown of different materials and things that you might have in your environment. So when it comes to VOCs and moving into a home, a new home that has VOCs, I'm not suggesting that you rip everything out, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars redoing everything using natural materials. That's Again, that's not realistic, but how can we work with where we're at? How can you work with what is already installed and do the best that you can? The last thing I want to talk about is non-native electromagnetic frequencies. We call that non-native EMFs or some people might call it EMR, which is electromagnetic radiation. Either way, it's all referring to all of the radiation that's put off from our Wi-Fi, our smart meters, our electronics, our building wiring, really anything that's hooked up to our electrical system. And this can be really disruptive to our cellular health. It can impact our sleep. There's a whole host of issues. There's a lot of links to radio frequencies and infertility and cancer. So this is definitely not something that we want to be bombarded with in our homes. And unfortunately, in today's world, we are adding more and more and more smart technology into our new build process, our renovation process. Our appliances are now smart. They emit a signal so that we can connect them to an app on our phone. And that is actually putting off a lot of radiation. And that is the exact same radiation that studies have found linked to infertility and cancer. So we definitely want to have an electromagnetic radiation assessment of our home, have somebody come in and just get us down as much as we you possibly can. It's not always feasible to leave an environment, but we will be talking in an upcoming podcast episode about what to look for, some really big red flags when it comes to EMFs, things that you just can't avoid, or things I should say you can't shield. So it is important to avoid living in homes like that. But for the most part, there's a lot of things that we can do to minimize our exposure when it comes to EMFs in our home. I like to think as EMFs sort of like a cigarette. And actually I got this analogy from my mentor, Orem. He had first said this, but he said, you know, if there's a cigarette burning in another room, are you just going to go out and buy an air purifier and set the air purifier next to you and allow that the air around you to be clean? Or are you going to go find the cigarettes and put it out? And the same thing goes for with emfs we are not going to just buy these gizmos and gadgets and blockers and harmonizers and all these things to try to protect our immediate sphere right we want to figure out what are the sources of our exposure how can we go find those remove that exposure turn it off so that we're just not getting exposed at all so we're putting that cigarette out i like the analogy of a cigarette because you can actually visualize that cigarette smoke so So, you know, that is really, really important piece of having a healthier home. So now I want to stop here for a moment and say that we're not striving for perfection. That is not what this is about. We're not here to fear monger you or create anxiety. This is here to empower you with knowledge that you can make the best possible decisions for your home and your family. You do not need to burn the house down, but if your health is suffering, it is worth asking, you know, is my home environment playing a role? And so that's really up for you to decipher. If you are experiencing mystery symptoms and you can't get to the root cause of those symptoms and you feel like you've tried a lot of things and it's not working, then it's definitely worth asking for help. exploring if your environment is playing a role. On the flip side, if you're not experiencing any symptoms, there's no need to panic and start spiraling and think you need to burn the house down because I have, I've been there, um, where I have, you know, at the beginning of my journey, when I first started learning about all this, I thought, oh my gosh, like everything is, is killing us. And it's not, it's not really the truth of the situation, but this stuff can be a little bit scary to learn about. It can sort of start to heighten our fight or flight response in our body. And so I'm here to tell you that it is possible to take these things one step at a time and just know that these things can be pretty easily mitigated with some time and some resources. And at the very minimum, every single person here listening deserves a home that is not bombarding us with these big threats from our our environment. And this is not an exhaustive list. These are just sort of the bigger things that I see being an issue for people. We'll do some other episodes on some other environmental toxins. We have issues with carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide from our gas and appliances. And then carbon dioxide will actually is linked to a lot of fatigue as well. And that when we don't have fresh air in our homes, every time we breathe in, every time we breathe out, we have carbon dioxide elevating in our air. And that can also make us feel a little bit sleepy. So there's a lot of different tools and tests and things that you can do to kind of monitor your home, your indoor environmental quality. And I'm going to put all of that in the show notes. I'm going to put all of my favorite things for testing for carbon dioxide, for humidity, for formaldehyde, a lot of user-friendly consumer grade things that you can have to start monitoring your home to start under understanding what what is the environment that you're living in right now and maybe it could be the thing that is contributing to your health and I realized when I got a carbon dioxide meter that the levels of carbon dioxide were really really high in my home because I wasn't getting enough fresh air into the home and so every time we were going to sleep we were raising the levels of carbon dioxide in the bedroom and that can make you feel really sluggish really fatigue and there's a lot of overlapping symptoms with that as there are with being in a mold exposure. Before we start to let our emotions get the best of us and we start to jump to conclusions about what could be happening in our environment, I always think it's better to test, get the data that you need, work with a professional who can help you assess your indoor environment to start to dissect and see what's going on. If you are having symptoms, and then look at everything from a really rational logical perspective which can be extremely hard to do when we are when we are living in mold trauma from mold exposure so Again, this is what we feel like at a minimum, every home should have to be healthy. That is a very baseline level of health to have a home that minimizes and reduces your risk to these things. But once you have that, there is so much more that you can do. So some things that you can do to optimize your home and nor your home are to bring in more natural materials because natural materials are going to emit negative ions. These are the same types of ions that we get when we are grounding, when we are standing next to a waterfall or somewhere really beautiful in nature. If you've ever been in nature and you're just like in awe and you just feel that like overwhelming sense of happiness, that is negative ions. And so if you're you're making choices, if you're changing things in your home, then you might look at selecting more natural materials that are made from clay or other minerals that can actually improve and add those elements of negative ions in the air. You might also choose to start aligning your circadian rhythm. You might choose to swap out some light bulbs and add in more warm colored lighting that you can have before sunrise and after sunset. Blue light can be really toxic to us. There's a lot of research on blue light and insulin. Actually blue light can impact our cortisol. It can impact our insulin levels. So we want to be, we want to be avoiding blue light exposure as much as possible. However, you know, first and foremost, we need to get, make sure our home has a baseline level of safety, and then we can start to optimize by bringing in different lights and and finding things that are more red toned and full spectrum light during the day. You might also want to start looking into acoustics and how can you actually create a quieter home. There is a lot of information on sound and how hearing echoes, hearing that reverberation can actually be really on our nervous systems because it's not, it's stressful, it's not natural to hear so much echoing and reverberation. So acoustic comfort does matter. And that is something that, you know, if you are building, if you are renovating, you know, adding some of those types of strategies into the walls is going to make a really big difference as well. When we think about nourishing and adding more nourishment to our home, we also can't forget about clean water. You have to consider whole home water filtration. I'm adding this to the nourishment side of your home because everyone can go out and get like a countertop water filter or a water pitcher or something to get clean water. But as we begin to optimize our homes, we might look at bringing whole home filtration in where we can actually bring clean water to our bathtubs, our sinks, our showers and areas where we might not normally have clean water being delivered. And then we could go even further and have a under sink drinking water filtration system, whether that's a reverse osmosis system, whether that's a carbon filtration system, whether it's a mix of both, you know, there's a lot to consider when it comes to water. And we're going to do a lot of different episodes when it comes to water, because there's a lot to unpack. Water is such an incredible element. It has the power to nourish us and it has the power to destroy. So we are going to talk in depth about water. But as part of that optimization of our home, we are probably going to be looking at adding some sort of more permanent water structure to our house. Now, it doesn't matter who I work with. We are going to have to make sacrifices somewhere when it comes to our homes. Everyone has a budget. Everyone has something different that's important to them. And when we work with our clients, we always try to help you figure out what is going to be the biggest bang for your buck based on your goals. They're not striving for perfection. That is unattainable. There is no such thing as perfect. So I wanted to share this with you today to to give you an overview of the different types of things that we look at when we are considering a healthy home. And I wanted to give you an idea of what we mean when we say healthy home so that you have an understanding of what that means to us. And in the end, it's really what does it mean to you? What are you looking for? What is important to you? If you're new on this journey and you're just trying to maintain or, you know, a healthy home, what is important to you? You know, make a list of the things that are important to you because somewhere along the line, we're all going to have to compromise something. We're all going to have to make some sort of sacrifice because we live in the real world with real budgets and you know, we have to do the best that we can. And in my experience, when we can't do everything that we need to do in our home to make it healthy, we I really rely on nature and I really rely on getting outside as much as possible and soaking in all that nature has to offer because we can actually receive so much healing from the sun and being outside in the sun at very different times a day. We can receive so much energy from gathering free electrons from grounding, from putting our feet on the earth and doesn't even have to be barefoot, even just touching a tree or or touching something that's grounded outside, all of that, that all works. So if you feel like you're in a place right now where you're trying to escape an unhealthy home and you're feeling a little defeated because you can't afford or you don't have the means right now to do what you know you need to do to the home, to bring it up, to be healthier, then nature needs to be your best friend right now because that's There's so much healing that can happen. There are things you can do in your home to make it, to sort of create safe areas, to do the best that you can. And in that case, if that is you, I highly recommend working with somebody who can help you through that, like a mold consultant or somebody who can help you sort of determine what the issues are in your home and how to create some level of safety for you while you're trying to heal and unable to leave that environment. But if you can leave an unhealthy environment, I I highly recommend it because that really is going to speed up the progress exponentially. There are people who are listening to this, who are in the trenches, really trying to navigate a super unhealthy situation. And there are people who are here who just want to be preventative. So you have to understand where you're at and the level of what you need to do for your home is going to look different depending on where you're at in your journey. And I can probably you that is possible to have a healthier environment and it healing is waiting for you on the other side. If you want me to go deeper on any of these topics, please let me know in the comments. I'm happy to go deeper. I do plan to go deeper on all these topics, but today, since it's the first episode, I really just wanted to break this down for you. Super simple of what a healthy home means to us. But if there's something specific you want to learn about, you want us to dive deeper in, you want us to speak to a guest about and maybe a guest expert on, then drop it in the comments and we will make it happen. So excited to share this information with you. And yeah, until next time. Thanks so much for tuning into today's podcast. We have one more thing before you go. We are giving away one spot into our Conscious Construction Container Program, which is our signature program that helps you build and renovate your home from the ground up to reduce your exposure to mold, chemicals, and electromagnetic radiation. And even if you're not building a home, we've had a lot of students who have gone through the program who are not building a home who have found immense value in going through the program because now they understand how their homes work and they're able to spot issues in homes that they're tag a friend who you think would love this podcast or could benefit from the podcast. And every tag is another entry. I just want to say thank you so, so, so much for being here, for listening, and for leaving a rating and review because this is going to help us get better guests onto the podcast in the future to provide you with more value. So we really, really do appreciate every star, every like, every comment, every and every subscribe that you can give us because it really does help us bring you more value in the future. So thanks again for being here and we'll see you on the next episode.