Designs that are a Breath of Fresh Air!

Nicolette Toussaint is an expert in redesigning rooms to minimize dust and maximize ease of cleaning while ensuring that your home remains a place of comfort and beauty. The breathe-easy room at left, designed for an asthma sufferer, shows how handsome your design can be.

Your home can be a place where you can breathe easy, safe from allergens and the toxins that are "outgassed" by most carpets, many synthetic floors, paints and even your cabinets.

It's an unsettling fact that indoor air is far more polluted than outdoor air. Because we trap air inside, all the glues, fixatives and preservatives in finishes have no way to escape, making indoor air as much as nine times as polluted as outdoor air.

Radon, a lung cancer-causing gas that escapes out of the ground into homes with poor ground sealing, is yet another problem.

Steps to Managing Dust Allergies

Those suffering from dust allergies are not allergic to the dust itself, but rather to waste from a microscopic creature, the dust mite. The trick to making your home comfortable for you is to make it inhospitable to dust mites. Among the important steps to take are listed below.

Bedroom Improvements

• Encase mattress with a dust mite-proof cover
• Use encasing under pillow cases
• Replace curtains with hard-surfaced window coverings
• Remove rugs and/or carpeting
• Let in the sun! Dust mites like dark, moist places
• Use bedding that can be washed weekly in extremely hot water

Living Room Alterations

• Replace curtains with hard-surfaced window coverings
• Remove rugs or carpet
• Replace all cloth-covered furniture with un-upholstered or leather-covered furniture. (You don't have to have a chunky, black leather couch. The gorgeous white leather Barcelona chair at right would be as easy on your lungs as it is on your eyes.)
• Dust every week
• Vaccuum weekly using a vaccum cleaner that contains an HEPA charcoal filter

Let Nicolette take the weight off your shoulders - and lungs - by planning and supervising your "breathe easy" redesign. Sliding scale rates are available for those who are retrofitting due to health problems.