Ten Ways to Create a Healthy Home

When you are thinking about your health, you naturally gravitate towards food and exercise. Your body needs nutritious and healthy food, and your body needs you to move more, but what about the rest of your life? Have you considered how you can be healthy in other ways? When you go to work, do you cycle or walk? Do you drive or get public transport? If you are traveling to work in the fumes of the other cars on the motorway, then you may not be commuting in the healthiest way. You should also consider looking at where you live – especially as your  environment really matters when you are trying to be healthy. The house you live in is where you spend much of your time, and the worst thing that you could be doing is spending too much time in a place that affects you.

While housework is a good way to keep the house clean, you also want to ensure that you are doing everything that you can to improve your living environment. You want to feel good in the place you spend much of your time, and the way you live has an effect on your long-term health as much as it does your short term health. There are things that you can change around and some of them are easy where other changes that you make are harder. You want to do what you can to re-examine the habits of a lifetime, and the right environment alongside your nutrition and exercise will make you feel good. You want to cut down your exposure to unhealthy air and an environment that doesn’t really work for you in the long-term. So, we’ve put together ten ways you can start to create a healthier home and live a little better. Take a look at the ten suggestions we’ve got, and let us know if you have any of your own!

Ten Ways to Create a Healthy Home

1. Start with the dust in the house. You likely clean your house a few times a week, but how often are you paying attention to the dust? Sure, surface dust on coffee tables is probably wiped away, but do you wipe away the dust inside the air vents and on the fan blades? You need to consider how you dust your house and how you can improve upon it. House dust can aggravate allergies, it can make you feel gross and it can contain chemicals that will make you feel sluggish and ill. Dust isn’t something that you should be taking lightly, and even chemicals that were used in your home a year ago can still create dust in the house. The best thing to do is to minimize the carpeting in your house, keep on top of a good dust regime and really indulge in some elbow-grease! Dust gets in everywhere, so notice where the most common areas are and do what you can to minimize the amount of dust that comes in. If you are vacuuming regularly, make sure that your vacuum efforts are good and actually clean and replace the filter in the cleaner regularly!
2. It’s time to cut down on smoking if you want to have a healthy home. You know that it’s a filthy habit, but it is an addiction so you shouldn’t be under any illusions that this will be easy to kick. Secondhand smoke is a bigger threat to you in the house, and even if you smoke outside, the windows and vents are still going to allow smoke to come through the house and that’s the problem. The staining on the walls and ceilings is one thing but the air you breathe needs to be clean. The vents are supposed to filter all the toxins, but you can go one better by making sure that you don’t introduce toxins in the air in the first place. Kicking an addiction is a great way to save you money on your future health costs, and you can keep the walls and ceilings and vents clean of any leftover smoke.
3. Test your home with an expert – they can look for traces of lead and asbestos in the wood and walls of the home. You may never have painted with lead in your home but that doesn’t mean that previous owners haven’t and you are now breathing in those particles. The air in your home should be clean, and the best thing to do is to strip all paintwork back and get rid of all traces of either asbestos and lead. An expert can come to your home and test it to ensure that you are living in the healthiest home possible.
4. Speaking of clean air, have you considered having your filters and HVAC thoroughly cleaned out and replaced? There are companies out there that can help you to get the clean air you want for your home, and Molekule is a San Francisco-based science and clean air company who can help. You should be breathing in clean air in your home, not dust or dirt-laced air that makes you sick! Air pollution significantly affects your health, so you can get the air cleaned and invest in air purifiers in the house, too. Investing in the right air purifiers will help you to mitigate your risks of heart disease and lung issues, too.
5. It’s time to put away the scented candles that you like to burn for hours on end. While they smell god, they’re not good for your lungs. Petroleum-based paraffin wax candles have a chemical released that can lead to allergies, asthma and even cancer in some cases. If you swap these over to soy candles instead, you’ll be able to enjoy gorgeous scents without the chemicals being emitted.

1. Start cleaning with homemade cleaning products. There’s nothing wrong with bleach, but cleaning with it means that you’re breathing in those chemicals as you clean. It’s not good for your lungs, so you need to consider the toxins in your environment. Cleaning with bleach means leaving those toxins all over the places you clean, and so swapping these for things like white vinegar, baking soda, lemon juice and more will help. You should have a clean house without the hacking cough that comes with it!  
2. The environment in which you live should make you feel good, and that means being able to wake up in the morning knowing you can get to work without feeling sluggish and low. Controlling the light in the house will help you to wake up well every day, especially if you live in the middle of a city or a heavily lit town. Blocking out the light from the outside is as important as removing the toxins where you can. Bad sleep will make you feel low, and that’s going to impact your health in the long run.
3. Take the time to go through your food and cleaning cupboards and get them cleaned out properly. Crumbs build in the cupboards and drawers of the kitchen, and you need to consider that this can lead to pests. No home with pests is a healthy one, as you risk breathing in the particles from pest poop, animal hair in the food areas and the risk of pests moving through your food. Your environment for cooking should be as clean as possible, or you end up risking your health and you should live somewhere that is clean and clear in food preparation areas.
4. Introducing a garden into the home may sound counterproductive for a healthy environment, but it’s going to really improve it instead! A garden is dirty and messy, but it’s also full of lush plants and the chance to grow your own organic veggies! Green gardens give you more clean and natural oxygen, a space to grow vegetables and plant fruit trees and you also get in a workout – gardening can be a tough workout!
5. Do you have a filter jug in the refrigerator for water? You need to look at either installing a jug in the kitchen or having a water filter put directly on the faucet. Local water companies filter and clean water before they allow it through the pipes, but it still has to come through contaminated pipes before it gets to your kitchen. So, add your own water filter and you get that reassurance that your water is coming through as clean as healthy as possible.

A healthy home needs you to breathe better, eat better and drink cleaner water. You also need to minimize your toxins in the home, too. You deserve to wake up everyday and feel healthy and happy, and you can only do that when you work on your house. Treat your environment in the same way you would your diet and exercise regimen – as if it’s important to you. Your health matters and the way you live will impact your health more than you think. Take the time to work on your house and you’ll see a huge difference.