Cleanly Colonial: Renovating a 20th-Century Farmhouse, Toxin Free

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Linda and Peter expanded and enclosed the original verandah to house a new dining room. The generous use of glass and French doors provides healthy sunlight and fresh air nearly year-round. In-floor radiant heating keeps the Italian tile warm and, unlike forced-air heat, doesn’t circulate pollens and dust. Wood finishes are natural or low-VOC. Photo By Philip Beaurline

Linda Mellen can tell you exactly when her troubles began—though at the time, those hopeful months of 1992 foretold joy, not pain. Side by side with her new husband, Peter, Linda was building a 3,000-square-foot log house in Massachusetts. It was a house so dramatic that friends teased them about its imposing size; a house so grand, Peter describes it as a palatial Adirondack lodge.

And it was so full of toxic materials that over the next several years it would render Linda deathly ill.

At first, her symptoms were vague, leaving her with a general sense of ill health. Then came the migraines, so debilitating they nearly blinded her. “I thought I had a brain tumor,” she says. Once a runner, Linda could barely walk a few city blocks without feeling faint and dizzy, and visits to the mall left her with earaches.

Doctors couldn’t tell Linda what was wrong with her, and her symptoms worsened. Finally, several years after she first became ill, she visited a doctor in New Mexico who diagnosed her as suffering from multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS). It was the first step on a long road to wellness.

Today, Linda, who also suffers from a chronic autoimmune illness, believes the MCS was triggered by an overdose of toxins from the stains and sealers she and Peter used to finish the log house—a task they completed in the dead of winter with windows and doors firmly shut. “The day after I did the staining, I would be in bed. I couldn’t get up,” she says. “Then when we went to Hawaii in the winter, as soon as I got there, I felt better because I was outdoors all the time.”

The Road to Charlottesville 

Linda and Peter sold the log house within a year of building it and moved to New Mexico, but the dry, dusty climate only contributed to Linda’s declining health. The Mellens needed a home in a place wet and green, where the air and water were clean and they could indulge their love of organic gardening. They packed up a U-Haul and headed east. “Just by chance,” recalls Peter, “we came through Charlottesville [Virginia]. We stopped by the side of the road, and Linda was just overwhelmed by the smell of the spring blossoms, the green countryside.”

A year later, in 1997, the Mellens became only the fourth family in more than 200 years to own an eighteenth-century property called Mt. Ayr in Scottsville, just south of Charlottesville. “It was one of the prettiest farms we’d seen,” Linda says. “One-hundred-and-thirty acres of rolling meadows, streams, springs, and old oak and hickory forest.”