Understanding Home

My Journey to Understanding the Two Places I Lived: My Home and My Body

If you had told me 5 years ago I’d be an avid researcher of the performance of buildings with a special interest in HVAC I wouldn’t have believed you.

In fact, when I was growing up I always thought I’d be a doctor; medicine and the human body always fascinated me and from an early age I started researching how it worked. However, due to consistent health struggles that made learning environments like school challenging, I forged a different path - one that catered to my strengths but overwhelming left me unfilled and stressed. More in another article.

Following a massive health crisis in 2021, my research began anew on the health side trying to understand why certain individuals (me) remained persistently unwell despite doing everything “right.” It turns out there was a major factor I had never considered and one I had consistently overlooked. The place where I was spending the majority of my time (especially in COVID times), my home.

Suddenly it was like a snowball being pushed down a mountain. The connections to my health status and the places I was living became undeniable. Every time I thought I knew something I gained new information. The fear and anxiety was immense. How does one escape their home? How does one convince another party in the home that the place we rest our heads is becoming a noose around my neck. Anyone who first tries to investigate if their home is contributing or causing their or their family’s health problems likely understands.

I was determined to understand. I was determined to understand both how and why my body was reacting the way it was and similarly why and how buildings were able to exert such an effect on them.

I fell into the classic pit falls: “We have to get rid of everything.” “We can only live in a new build.” “I will never get well because I have the ‘dreaded’ HLA genes.” “We may have to live in a tent indefinitely.” I circled the drain in Facebook groups that were supposed to be helpful and an authority on mold. I vowed that if I ever got to a place of health reclamation and safety I would help others and share what I’d learned.

It took 1.5 years to reclaim my health back; but during that time I spent over a thousand hours reading, taking courses, talking to industry experts, getting certified in various relevant fields, attending both paid and unpaid seminars, webinars and summits.

And then suddenly I was well enough and I decided to honor my vow. I started Guided Well in July 2022 as a health and mold consultancy. I started seeing clients. I started learning new things and unlearning others. I learned that some of my own trauma and fear was bleeding into my work. I started learning that, especially in homes, some principles are theoretical and do not apply 100% of the time and that each home was as unique and different as a body.

I started seeing patterns though. Eventually, my attention and interest switched totally to the building side and I dove in deeper. Finding a study that encompassed this all - building science - was a revelation.

I realized one of the biggest underlying problems, or root causes if you will, was that people have no idea about the systems and inner workings of their homes. I had a 125+ question intake spanning all sections of the building top to bottom and the systems within it and 90% of clients couldn’t answer all the questions.

Clients could not answer things like the age of their roof, where their HVAC was located or the last time they changed its filter. They couldn’t tell important historical information. Some didn’t know what type of foundation they had. I’ll get into why these things are so important in later writings.

It was incredibly clear to me that while problems exist in homes irrespective of owner/occupants a big problem was the lack of knowledge and understanding of the place they call home and the lack of stewardship of it.

I, however, found compassion in my own experience because not long before I had lived inside a system I did not understand, yet that system had exerted a profound influence on my health, my nervous system, and my sense of safety. And I had never questioned it, because like most people, I had been taught to think of a home as a fixed structure that only needed reactive attention, rather than a dynamic system with its own behaviors, stressors, and failure points and something that is bolstered by proactive maintenance and surveillance.

The deeper I went, the more I began to see that homes follow patterns. They accumulate stress. They compensate. And they reveal signals long before problems become obvious. (Sounds a lot like our other home, our body) But you have to know where to look. But most people never learn where and how to look.

This realization fundamentally changed the direction of my work.

What began as a personal search for answers, down 2 inexplicably converging paths, became something much bigger. It became my mission to understand the underlying principles that govern how home environments behave, how problems develop, and why some environments quietly — or loudly — erode occupant health, and most importantly, how I could begin educating others on these critical concepts.

This Substack is a continuation of that pursuit.

In future writings, I’ll share what I’ve learned. I’ll be pulling from not just from my own experience, but from years of studying homes, working with clients and observing the patterns that repeat across structures, climates, and circumstances.

Because understanding how your home works changes how you interact with it.

Thanks for being here. More next time.

Megan

If this framing resonated with you — the idea that your home and your body are in constant conversation — Know Thy Home™ is where to go next. It's the foundational guide to understanding the six systems your home operates through, and how each one affects the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the environment your body lives in every single day. The education that should come with every set of keys. Start here → Know Thy Home™, $67