I first launched Toxic Free Talk Radio back in September 2011, to celebrate the publication of my book Toxic Free.

I did a marathon—12 hours straight!

1:00 hour – Michael Piachenza, owner of Pest Control Naturally will talk about what’s available today in nontoxic and natural pest controls for home, lawn, and termites.

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxic Free Talk Radio Marathon Hour #2

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Michael Piachenza

Date of Broadcast: September 08, 2011

DEBRA: We’re back. I was just eating some organic food during the music to get my strength up, and drinking some purified water. This is Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio.

We’re doing a 12-hour marathon today, talking about toxic until midnight tonight, Eastern time, to celebrate the release of my new book, Toxic Free. And in this hour, we are going to have Michael Piachenza who owns a business called Pest Control Naturally here in Clearwater, Florida.

Excuse me just a moment. There’s someone who needs to ask me a question. Oh, sorry, okay.

So, we’ll be here with Michael in just a few minutes after I make some announcements.

So, you can go to my website, DebraLynnDadd.com, D-E-B-R-A-L-Y-N-N-D-A-D-D dot com. And right across the top is a green bar which has a bunch of links in it. There’s one that says, “Toxic Free Talk Radio.” You can click on that and on that page is the whole, entire schedule of everybody who’s talking today. There are also links to all my guests’ websites. And so, you can go there and get a link to go to Michael’s website if you are inclined to do so.

We have a caller. I’m just going to take this call, and then I see that I have Michael holding. And so then we’ll get to interviewing Michael about toxic-free pesticides.

Hello, caller. You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd, Toxic Free Talk Radio. Hello? You’re on the air.

Okay, I’m not hearing you at this end, so please call again. We’ll see what’s going on technically.

I’m going to go to Michael now, and let’s hope that one connects.

Hi, Michael.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Hello, Debra.

DEBRA: Hello. Thanks for being here.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: My pleasure.

DEBRA: So I’ll just introduce you again, and say that Michael has a non-toxic, natural pest control service in Clearwater, Florida. And he does a lot of alternative things instead of toxic chemicals. If you’re actually on the page where, on BlogTalkRadio, you’re looking and seeing the pictures go by on the player, Michael is the one with the blue shirt on. Very cute.

So I’ve just recently met Michael. So I’m very interested to hear everything that you have to say. Why don’t you start by telling us how you got interested in doing away with all these toxic pesticides and pest control? What’s motivating you to do this?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Well, I like to say I’m the only person I know that got into pest control for health reasons. This is an industry that’s just riddled with health problems. Many of my competitors are suffering from cancer and all types of different health conditions.

DEBRA: That’s something that we don’t usually think about that we hire somebody to do something toxic, but we don’t think about what are the health conditions of the workers that are giving us these services.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Yes, it really is a shame. These guys are constantly, constantly exposed to synthetic pesticides.

Maybe in low dosages or infrequent dosages, the body can handle that. But when you’re doing it day in and day out, that’s a tough environment to be in.

DEBRA: So did you get sick, or were you just looking around and saying, “I don’t want to get sick.”

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Well actually, I’m an ex-fiber optic executive, and I was looking for another direction to move in, and I was getting tired of traveling all over the world. And a good friend of mine owns Advantage Pest Control. He asked me to come on board. My first response was, “No, thank you. I don’t want to be around all those toxic chemicals.”

But I did what I did in the fiber optics industry, as I just did research. I just went out and did a bunch of research, and found that this actually can be done in an effective way, and much more safely.

So he agreed to let me come on board, and start up the safe, natural side of the company. This was about a little over four years later, and we’re the probably fastest-growing pest control company in Pinellas County.

DEBRA: That’s great. I’m really glad to hear that the public is responding to it.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Most definitely.

DEBRA: Just pick one, what is the most frequently-asked for alternative pest control treatment?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: My favorite is diatomaceous earth. It’s just amazing how many people misunderstand how diatomaceous earth works, what’s safe about it, and what’s not safe about it.

DEBRA: What’s safe and not safe, and what do you use it for?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Well, I don’t like to use it. A lot of people call up, and say, “Hey, I’m going all safe. I’ve been using diatomaceous earth.” And they dust their pets with it. They dust their house with it.

The way it works is it’s fossilized sea creatures. It’s little diatoms. Their skeletal structure is very, very sharp, and as the insects crawl through it, it scratches its exoskeleton, their waxy, protective covering, and it causes them to dry out, and they just shrivel up and die.

That in itself is all fine. The problem is, is that as mammals, we breathe in these little diatoms, and they get into their lungs, their sharp, little specks, and our lungs have no way of expelling them. So they have to insist over that spot. And you do that enough, then you start to lose lung capacity.

DEBRA: So diatomaceous earth isn’t something that we should use as an alternative then. This is, I think, a really important point because I think a lot of people use diatomaceous earth because it doesn’t emit toxic chemicals. But diatomaceous earth is this little particle with sharp edges, and it can cause a different kind of harm. Even though it’s not toxic, it is hazardous.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Exactly. If you haven’t touched little parasites, I’d say get some food grade DE, and mix it up in a glass, and drink it down. You can put it in your pet’s dog food or cat food, and that’s fine, to take care intestinal parasites.

But you don’t want to breathe it in, in over a long period of time.

DEBRA: That’s good to know. So you don’t want to sprinkle it around in your house.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Exactly.

DEBRA: So what have people been using diatomaceous earth for, and then what would you do as the alternative?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Well, a lot of people use it for roaches and fleas, and to some degree, ants. I prefer to use something like sodium borate. Everybody’s heard of boric acid, or Borax, or 20 Mule Team Borax. All of those contain the mineral, boron, and the mineral boron is very, very safe. It’s all natural. And the way it works is it acts as a desiccant, so it will dry out eggs and some soft-shelled insects.

But other insects, when they ingest it, and they get it into their digestive system, it changes their digestive enzymes, and then they can’t assimilate any nutrients.

So it’s very, very safe. If you or I pick a one-day mineral, there’s going to be boron in there. And the way our system works is if we take in more boron than we need, we just pass it through, through our kidneys. It’s like taking too much vitamin C, I think.

So that’s as safe as it gets. The LD50 on it is twice that of table salt. The LD50 stands for the lethal dose and 50% of the population. So you’d have to eat twice as much boron than table salt for it to be deadly.

DEBRA: Well, that’s pretty safe.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Yes, I think so.

DEBRA: As long as you brought that up, let me just interject. A lot of times people assume that the word non-toxic has a legal definition, but it actually doesn’t. And we see it on labels a lot. But what it means is that for something to be considered toxic more than 50% of the animal pasture die on the LD50. And so if 49% of the animals die, it can be called non-toxic.

And so the line is actually very fine between the word non-toxic and toxic, if you’re just using those two words on a label.

And so this is where we, as consumers, need to do our homework and become familiar with these different ingredients, and so we can then say, “Well, the LD50 is zero,” or whatever, and we can compare it with ones that is a higher LD50. And all this information is available for all these chemicals.

And then we can compare how toxic one is versus another. It’s not about reading the product labels because they’re not going to give this information, but there are tons and tons of information available, some of which I have on my site. There would be more information on my site. Essentially, we have the internet. There’s been so much access to information about toxic. It’s really changed a lot.

So I’m just going to take a break with us for a second here, and we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: Okay Michael, before we go on, this is Debra Lynn Dadd, and you’re listening Toxic Free Talk Radio. And I’m just going to tell you about one of our offers today is that I have a limited number of my book, Toxic Free, which is being released today. And if you want to get an autographed copy that has today’s date in it, as being the first day of release, you can order that by phone, by calling 727-466-6812. An operator is standing by to take your order.

Now, also I just want to give everybody my website address. I have many URL’s on my website, but the main one to go to is DebraNonToxic.com. That’s D-E-B-R-A-N-O-N-T-O-X-I-C. And that page is the index to everything else that’s going on, on my website. You can always go there, find out what’s new, look at the whole, big pictures, and to just go to DebraNonToxic.com.

Michael, back to you, so we’ve talked about what’s toxic and what’s not toxic, tell us more about what one could expect if they called your business, or a business like yours, in terms of the spectrum of what you have to offer.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Well, my whole approach is to take a pragmatic view on things. People will call me up and they say, “Are you all organic?”

DEBRA: That’s a good question. What did you say?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: What I said, “Well, to be truthful with you, I have to say no because if I’m using borates, that’s an inorganic mineral. And that’s the safest thing in my arsenal. So I am not all organic.”

DEBRA: Before you go on, let’s just talk about what organic is because I think that organic is a big buzz word right now, and that people are looking for things to be organic. And if they’re not organic, then they think that they shouldn’t use them. But you just said that borates are inorganic minerals.

So just to straighten this out, there’s organic and inorganic chemistry. Organic usually has to do with something that’s living like a plant or an animal versus something that’s not living like a mineral or a rock. Is that your understanding, Michael? Am I correct here?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Yes.

DEBRA: So the fact that your borates are not living things, which could be called organic, then that doesn’t mean that they’re toxic. Salt is not organic. Sand is not organic. And that doesn’t mean that it’s harmful. It just means that it isn’t organic.

And then there’s this other term that is organically grown, which means for a food or a fiber that no pesticides have been used in the creation of that.

We have a caller, so we’re going to go and pick the call, and see what the question is.

Hello, caller. You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd and Michael Piachenza at Toxic Free Talk Radio.

You know, I think I’ve discovered the problem. I think what I need to do is put Michael on hold, and then take this caller. So hold on. Michael, I’m going to put you on hold, but don’t go away.

Okay caller, can you hear me now?

Okay, I need to figure out what is the technical problem with this, but in the meanwhile, I am going to put the caller back on hold. Michael, you hold on, and I’m going to put on some music. I’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: Okay, we’re back. Now, we’re trying to figure out, but since this is the first time that I’ve used this, why I’m not getting my caller calls because people are calling in, and we got a caller before, and we have a guess. It’s just fine. But some other calls are not coming through.

So we have another call now, and we’re just going to try it, and see if we can get that caller. Thank you all for your patience.

Hello, caller. You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd.

Okay, let’s not despair about this. I am having somebody working on this problem. So I’m going t back to Michael, and I’ll let you know when I think that we’re ready with the caller thing.

Michael, I’m taking you off hold now. Okay Michael, are you there?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Yes, I am.

DEBRA: Okay, good. Thank you for your patience.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: I could not hear the caller though.

DEBRA: I couldn’t hear the caller either. Did you hear the music?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: No, I was just on hold.

DEBRA: That’s right. You were on hold.

So let’s go back and talk with you about natural pest controls. What were we talking about? Do you remember, or shall we start over?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: That’s quite all right. When you get into this whole organic, natural, there are a lot of terminologies that get thrown around. In my industry, somebody can claim to be a practicing, integrated pest management. Well, what does that mean? It means that they’re focusing on prevention, making sure that the bugs don’t get in, on cleanliness, on educating the customer.

And they can do all these very good things. And then if they still have bugs, they can come through as synthetic pesticides.

And they’re still practicing integrated pest management.

So there’s a new term afoot called green pest management.

DEBRA: Uh-oh. What does that mean?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Basically, what they’re doing there is they’re taking all of the elements of integrated pest management like good preventative and customer education, and then using more safe and natural products to combat the pests, if they’re still an issue.

DEBRA: Michael, hold on just a minute, because I do want to fix this, so that we can get the callers. I have two callers, so I am going to try to get one of them, and then try to get the other one.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Sure.

DEBRA: Hold on just a second. Caller, are you there? Hello? Okay, I’m going to try another caller. The calls are lining up here, so I want to be able to get them.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: I understand.

DEBRA: Okay, I’m going to try another one. Hello, caller.

BONNIE: Can you hear me?

DEBRA: Yes, I can hear you.

BONNIE: Hallelujah.

DEBRA: Excellent.

BONNIE: I have a question.

DEBRA: Hold on. What number did you call?

BONNIE: I called the 877-whatever number you gave at the beginning of the call.

DEBRA: Callers, please note this down. Call 877-497-1811. There’s another number on the website which is not the toll-free number, 619 number. Perhaps that number isn’t going through. But this caller just got through on 877-497-1811. So that’s the number we’re going to use. I’ll keep announcing it, so that everybody can get it. Okay caller, what’s your name?

BONNIE: Hi, it’s Bonnie.

DEBRA: Hi, Bonnie. Thanks for calling. So what’s your question for me?

BONNIE: I have a question. This is actually twofold question, so maybe I can take up for the one call that was missed. But with the pest control, I’ve been in a very tight community. And the homes are literally 5 to 10 feet apart from one another.

Although I practice safe pesticide and I’ve called all of the pest control people around where I live [inaudible 00:24:31], what is the actual, I might say “drying time”, I guess, for these pests when they spray them because we’re in a very windy environment near the ocean.

When my neighbors get sprayed, I pretty much hole up in my house all day. I was wanting to know what would be a safe time period for drying, and how long does it remain active?

The second question is more specific to this time of year. I’m getting deluged with spiders.

DEBRA: Okay Michael, I’ll let you answer both those questions.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Well, as far as the drying time, it depends on what they’re spraying. If they’re spraying something that dissolves in a water, in a wettable powder or something like that, then it’s just really as long as it’s going to take for the water to evaporate off and leave the residual. And the residual is either going to leave a powdery substance on top of the plant or it may be actually absorbed into the plant. Most of these are considered to be, and that’s “considered,” to be safe once they dry.

BONNIE: That’s what they tell me.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Now, if it’s oil-based, it’s actually not going to dry. And the whole thing about oil-based is to keep it in a liquid state. That’s a whole topic we can spend a few hours on, but for the most part, with the industry claims, the little sign you see on the lawn after it’s been sprayed is basically “Keep pets and children off until dry.” That’s all that says.

Now, spiders, this is something that comes up a lot. People are like, “What can I do for spiders? How can I kill spiders?”

Most pesticides, most pests that we go after, we’re either going to kill by putting down something that they walk through and then they groom themselves (they’re going to groom their feet or antennas), so they ingest it that way, or you put down baits. They pick it up and take it back, and they either eat it or feed it to their colony. And that’s really 90% of the pesticides out there whether it’s organic, natural or what. Those are the ways they’re going after it.

Spiders do not groom themselves, and they don’t pick up baits. So, the best thing you can do with spiders is knock down their webs. It takes a lot of energy for them to produce that web, and that web is their food factory. And they have to regenerate that web on an empty stomach. Many times they don’t have enough energy to that and they die.

That’s the best way to go. Plus, if you get rid all of the other bugs that the spiders are eating, then they won’t have anything to eat, and they’re going to die off, and there’s no reason for them to stay.

BONNIE: Okay, thanks.

DEBRA: We’ve got a whole line of callers here, so we’re going to move on to the next caller now. Thank you very much for your call.

Wow! I’m just going to say the switchboard is lighting up. Hold on, let’s see. Who’s next? I’m so getting used to doing this.

Okay, here we go.

Hello, caller. You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd and Michael Piachenza on Toxic Free Talk Radio. The number to call to get through, I’m told, is 877-497-1811.

So I’m going to go to the next caller, and be sure to speak up when I say hello. Hello, caller. You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd and Michael Piachenza. Hello. Are you there? Okay, we’ll go on to the next one. Remember, the number is 877-497-1811, not the one that’s listed on the website that begins with 619. It’s 877-497-1811.

I’ll try the next caller. Hello, caller. This is Debra Lynn Dadd. Are you there? Hello? You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd.

Okay, I’ll go to the next one.

Hello, caller. Are you there? You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd and Michael Piachenza. Hello? Hello? [Inaudible 00:29:47] with the callers here. And yes, we’re not getting through.

I apologize for this technical problem here.

Hello, caller. Are you there? Okay, we’ll go to the next one. Hello, caller. You’re on the air. Are you there? Hello, you’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd. Are you there?

I’m going to have to get the company on the phone here at some point because some of them are working and some of them aren’t, and I’m not understanding why yet. So we’ll figure it out because we just got calls lined up and lined up.

Remember, the number is 877-497-1811.

I’m going to the next one.

Hello, caller. You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd. Are you there? Hello? Hello, you’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd.

Are you there?

Okay, we’ll go to the next one. Hello, you’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd. Hello, caller.

CALLER: [inaudible 00:31:22]

DEBRA: I know. Hello, you’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd. Hello, caller in the 714 area code. Hello, are you there?

CALLER: Yes.

DEBRA: Oh, good. We got one. But we lost them. No, I’ve got it. Caller, please go ahead with your question. Caller?

CALLER: Yes, I actually don’t have a question. I just want to listen to the show.

DEBRA: Okay, you don’t need to call in to listen to the show.

CALLER: So how I can I supposed to listen? It’s supposed to be from 10:30 to 12:30.

DEBRA: You just listen on your computer. Just listen on your computer. Go to BlogTalkRadio.com/DebraLynnDadd. And then you can hear the show.

CALLER: Can I hear it any time or just this time?

DEBRA: You can get it from any time from now until midnight tonight, eastern time.

CALLER: Sorry, can you give me the website again because it didn’t go through.

DEBRA: Just go to my website. Go to DebraNonToxic.com. And there’s a link right there at the top of the page. DebraNonToxic.com. Thank you for calling.

Okay, we’ll go to the next caller. Hello, caller. You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd.

Well, I wonder how many of you are listening to the show by calling in.

So here’s how it goes. If you want to listen to the show, all you need to do is go to my website, DebraNonToxic.com. There’s a link there that takes you to a page on my website. You just click on the name of the show. Right now, we’re in Marathon Show #1, and you just listen online. You don’t need to call to listen.

So I think that’s why people haven’t been asking questions because they’re calling in to listen. I think we’re getting it straightened out now.

Okay, so I’m going to take another caller and see if we have a question. Caller, you’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd and Michael Piachenza. Do you have a question?

CALLER: Hi. How are you?

DEBRA: Hi. I’m good. How are you?

CALLER: Good. I know that Michael had touched on spiders and how important it was to knock down their webs, but I am being overrun by black and brown widow spiders. I knocked down their webs, I tried to get rid of their egg sacs and smooshed them up, but I live next door to Grizzly Adams, so I can only do so much because he believes in nature, and he doesn’t maintain his nature. But it’s bad because they’re getting into my home, they’re nesting in my mailbox, underneath every window, on my fences.

It’s really bad and I’ve tried non-toxic and toxic chemicals to try to kill them, but they just don’t seem to be going anywhere.

Michael, what can I do or what can you do for me in order to get these brown and black widow spiders under control?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Well, the best thing to do then is to try to find where they’re harboring and laying their eggs, and go after them. Find a nice, organic or safe pesticide. And just on a very regular basis, go out and spray them. Knock down the webs. That’s good too.

If you get a big infestation like that you just got to go after them. You’re going to find them most off on the west side of the house, and they’re going to try to find little holes like people with barrel tiles, on their roof, those little tile opening, shoot inside of those.

Any little spots that they can get back inside, that’s where they’ll be.

CALLER: Okay. And I called in on the phone number, 619-996-1662 is the number that I called in on. So, I’ve been doing this good. Thank you so much.

DEBRA: Thank you so much. I think that the problem we’ve identified that people have been calling in, in order to listen, and you don’t need to call in to listen. You can just listen. So only call in if you have a question. The call-in numbers again are 619-996-1662 or toll-free, 877-497-1811.

And we’ll take the next caller.

Call, you’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd and Michael Piachenza on Toxic Free Talk Radio. Hello? I guess we don’t have a question there. There’s another one. Hello, caller. You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd and Michael Piachenza. Do you have a question?

Well, you know, you try to figure out what are the problem or errors are going to be. Hello, you’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd and Michael Piachenza. Do you have a question?

CALLER: I do not.

DEBRA: Okay, were you just listening to the show?

CALLER: I’m trying to get to the Eduardo San Roman Show.

DEBRA: Well, you have the wrong show.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: This is very fun.

DEBRA: Well, this is the first one. So here we have another caller. Hello, caller. You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd and Michael Piachenza. Do you have a question?

CALLER: Can you hear me?

DEBRA: I can hear you.

CALLER: Oh, good. I missed the part where he said get rid of the bugs the spiders eat. What does he recommend to get rid of the bugs that the spiders eat?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Well, it depends on the type of spider.

CALLER: Black widows.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Black widows.

CALLER: Yes, I don’t have it as bad as the caller before me had them, but that just seems to be the only concern that I have is the black widow. But I just tuned in when you had just finished talking about getting rid of what they eat.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Well, what they eat are other insects. And the black widows tend to make their webs up fairly high, so they’re primarily going after flying insects. There you want to practice your integrated pest management, which is to keep the bugs from getting in, make sure your screens are all tight, weather stripping.

And if you do have flying insects that are getting inside, there are some really nice, natural aerosols that you can use from EcoSmart which are so safe, they’re exempt from EPA Regulations.

If you kill off all the flying insects, then they don’t have anything to eat.

CALLER: Oh, okay. Thank you very much.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: You’re quite welcome. Thanks for calling.

CALLER: I’m glad I got through.

DEBRA: I’m glad you got through too.

CALLER: I called the 619 number also.

DEBRA: Okay, thanks. Next caller. You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd and Michael Piachenza. Do you have a question? Hello, caller? No, I guess not.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: [inaudible 00:39:47]

DEBRA: Here’s another one. Wow, lots of questions. This is great. Hello, you’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd and Michael Piachenza. Caller, do you have a question? Hello?

CALLER: Hello.

DEBRA: Hello, we can hear you. Go ahead with your question.

CALLER: Well, I was tuning into the Power is Now.

DEBRA: Well, that’s a different show.

CALLER: Yes, but this is the number that I was told to dial, 877-497-1811.

DEBRA: That’s the number that I was given for my show. It appears that several shows have the same number.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: This is a much more interesting show, I think.

DEBRA: I think so too. Caller, I’m going to hang up on you, and I don’t know what to do to straighten this out yet, but we’ll work on it.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Well Debra, how about if we just dialogue for a little bit, and maybe your assistant there could check into that on the background?

DEBRA: Yes, I think that we’re going to do that. Okay, Michael, we’re almost to the end of our hour. What would you like to tell us? What are some general tips that you’d like to tell us about how our listeners can control pests without toxic chemicals?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Well, there’s so much to talk about. Let’s talk for a moment about the classifications. You see, when you pick up a pesticide, it’s going to have either danger, warning or caution on it. And those are really just different thresholds of the toxicity for the LD50 actually.

So the caution can be made up of synthetic pesticides. But even the natural and the organic pesticides will still have a caution rating.

So one of the things you want to look for around there is they have a couple of new rankings that are within caution. One is called reduced risk and the other one is minimal risk. And that really gives you a much better indication of how safe it is.

Minimal risk is in the category, almost like a food additive. It’s so safe, it’s not even controlled by the EPA. Like the products from EcoSmart that I mentioned earlier, they have an entire product line called their Exempt Line. And those are all the ones that fit in that minimal risk category.

DEBRA: Go on.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: So that’s a good one for people to take a look at.

Another thing that comes up a lot, people are always asking me, they intermix three different terms. There’s pyrethrins, pyrethrums, and pyrethroids.

DEBRA: Wow, tell us about that because I get those mixed up too.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: I know, it’s easy to do, and I got to do it from memory now that I’ve brought it up. But the pyrethrums are made from Chrysanthemums. They’ve been around since the Persian days for combatting head lice and things like that.

Basically, what that is, it’s this ground up Chrysanthemum flowers.

Now, if you take that mixture and you extract just the element that is the insecticide, that’s a pyrethrin. Pyrethrum is the plant. Pyrethrin is the active ingredient.

Now, if you take that active ingredient and you synthesize it, or you create a totally synthetic product that acts like that, that’s a pyrethroid.

So those terms get batted around interchangeably by a lot of people. There’s a lot of pyrethroid products out there that are totally synthetic, and they’ve been synthesized to such a level that they have a half-life of six months. So we have to be careful about that.

DEBRA: I think that you brought up a really interesting point that I want to talk about for a minute because it spans a lot of different kinds of products.

The word natural is another one of those unregulated words because it doesn’t really have a legal definition. Natural cosmetics is a big one where this is true. There is an ingredient that comes from something like coconut oil which is a natural ingredient, a plant-based ingredient, yet it’s so synthesized into something else entirely that it’s not in the form it is that it is in nature.

And so still, it’s a manmade ingredient, just as if it were made from petrochemicals. It’s just that they’ve taken the molecules from coconut oil instead of crude oil.

Now, there is actually a big difference in how that behaves in your body. But when we hear that term natural, as you said there’s a big different between pyrethrins and pyrethroids. Pyrethrin is from natural Chrysanthemum. If you saw on a cosmetic label coconut oil, and it actually was, but that would actually be coconut oil.

The coco dimethyl betaine, or something like that, or sodium lauryl sulfate, both of those come from coconut oil, but they act very differently in your body than the natural coconut oil would. And I think there could be a confusion about what really is natural.

I think that it sounds like from what you’re telling me that you’re really wanting to go the route of using the most natural products possible.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Yes, most definitely. And even if you use any pyrethrin, it can be toxic to humans, to mammals. And basically, it’s a neurotoxin, and what it does is it short circuits the synapses and the nerve endings. And also in the insect, when you spray them with a neurotoxin, you’ll see their entire body is vibrating. It short circuits every one of their nerves.

You pick off these aerosol bombs in our house, and we’re filling the house with gases of pyrethrin, will it kill you? Probably not. Will it bother you? Most definitely. You breathe that in, and all of your nerve endings start firing like that, you get this terrible nervous feeling.

Now, there are other neurotoxins that only affect the nerve endings of an invertebrate. So that company, EcoSmart, it’s one of my favorites, they have patented an all-natural neurotoxin that only affects the nerves of the insects.

So you’ve got to be very careful about how we approach these things and the general terminology of natural.

Hemlock is all natural. Would you like a nice cup of tea?

DEBRA: No. People also think that natural things are not toxic, but there are all kinds of toxic things in the natural world.

Let me back up for a second because we’ve been living with things toxic since the beginning of humanness. But what’s different now is not that there is hemlock in the world, but that we have so many manmade chemicals, and they’re so dangerous to us because our bodies really don’t have any way to process them. We do have detox for some, but they look at these chemicals and they say, “What is this?” And they just put it in a storage place someplace because we don’t have the mechanisms to break them down. Or we have too many that we’re overloading our capacity.

And that’s why we need to reduce our exposure, and we need to get the toxic chemicals out of our body because we’re just overwhelming our bodies and destroying our health.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: That’s a great point. And you know, the natural cures are so much better.

Let me back up a second.

These synthetic products, the insect world quickly adapts to it and builds immunities to it, or like in the case of the mosquito, we sprayed the mosquitos down in the Panama Canal back in the 1950’s with DVT. And within a few generations, the mosquitos converted the DVT into DDD and DVE, and what that did is it made the mosquito toxic to their own predators.

So if we use things like the sodium borates that I was talking about earlier, insects cannot build an immunity to that. I use that product, you mix it with water, and you spray it on the wood, the lumber up in your attic, and termites cannot digest that wood.

They will not be able to digest that wood in a thousand years from now if that house is still standing.

DEBRA: We actually have used that product, Tim-bor.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Yes, Tim-bor is made by Nicus Corporation. That’s the brand name for it.

DEBRA: Yes, it’s T-I-M-B-O-R for anyone who’s interested in this. And since my husband found it just several years ago, every piece of wood we install in our house first gets treated with Tim-bor. And it smells like nothing, it protects the wood.

Don’t they not have any termite problems in Australia or someplace now because so many people were treating with Tim-bor just that the termites have nothing to eat?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: There you go. It’s highly been approved in this country. They have one called Bora-care from the same company. And they’re using that as a pre-treat. The traditional way, if you’re putting an addition in your house or building your house, is to go in there and use something like Termidor.

Termidor is banned in China. It’s so toxic. They put this stuff down at a rate of four gallons per linear foot of your footer.

DEBRA: Oh, my god.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Another four gallons on the inside, and if your footer is made out of a block, you’ve got to put another two gallons inside the block. So you’ve got 10 gallons per 10 linear foot, or a gallon per foot around your house of this stuff. And this stuff stays in the environment for years and years and years.

DEBRA: Oh, my god. We have another caller. So let’s try our next caller and see if this will work.

Hello, caller. You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd and Michael Piachenza. Hello, caller?

I have a message into the company to find out what we need to do about this. So hopefully, we’ll work it out.

Go on, Michael. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I just wanted to catch the callers if they come in.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: It’s probably greater than 95% of the houses that are being built.

DEBRA: Michael?

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: I thought I heard somebody trying to talk. I thought we had a caller got through.

DEBRA: No, go ahead.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Anyway, they’re using this chemical. It’s called Chemical Trench Vapor Barrier. Doesn’t that just sound delightful? And they are perfectly safe, borate-based products that can be used, and it’s all been approved by the State. And the problem is that most builders don’t even know about it. Most architects don’t know about it. So it doesn’t get factored into the permits, it doesn’t go into the prints and the drawings, so it’s a shame. It really is.

It’s just a sin, the amount of chemicals that are being poured out there.

DEBRA: You gave me an idea that there are chemicals that are being used in new constructions that people don’t even know about it. And there should be some kind of review of each of the processes and the plans. As a consultant, one of the things that I do is that I’m available to go over plans and specifications for building materials and help people specify building materials and finishing materials.

But if you don’t even know these things are there as part of the process, that there needs to be a review so that people can have truly toxic-free houses.

There’s another caller, so let’s try this new caller.

Hello, caller. Are you there? You’re on the air with Debra Lynn Dadd. It must be for the other show.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: [Inaudible 00:53:56] a good show though.

DEBRA: I think that there’s a problem with our 800 number. So I think that there are a lot of things that people can do.

There are a lot of alternatives to pesticides that we don’t need to be having so many pesticides, and that all of these options need to have more widespread publicity.

And that’s one of the reasons why I’m doing this show, and that I will continue to do this show every week because I want people to know that there is a toxic-free world out there that we don’t need to be using all of these toxic chemicals, and that there are alternatives.

If you like what you’re hearing here, it would be great if you would let other people know. We’re going to be on the air for another 10 hours until midnight tonight. And if you would go to Twitter or Facebook or [inaudible 00:54:55] or whatever and tell them that this is happening, and it’s something good, and that they can learn to be less toxic, that would be so fabulous.

Well, thank you so much for being with us, Michael. I really appreciated you being on here. I learned a lot and I’m sure that our listeners learned a lot too. And I certainly will be calling you in the future when we need some toxic-free insect control.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: That would be great. Let me do a little selfless plug.

DEBRA: Go ahead.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: Advantage Pest Control, and our website is PestControlNaturally.com. We’re servicing Pinellas County and the City of Tampa. We do rodent control, pest control, termite control, and lawn spraying.

Probably a future topic would be talking about the lawn spraying because that’s an area that’s really, really difficult to try to go natural.

DEBRA: Well, we can certainly do that because as I’ve said, I’m planning to do this weekly, so there are going to be lots of spaces and lots of topics that we can talk about. And I certainly will call you again and hope to see you soon.

MICHAEL PIACHENZA: I look forward to it, Debra. Thanks for all the good work you’re doing out there.

DEBRA: Thanks, Michael.

Okay, in the next hour, we’re going to have April Cook, who is a aesthetician. She will be talking about how toxic chemicals affect our skin in the negative way, and what we can do to have beautiful skin naturally, and about various kinds of care products.

I also have available a limited number of my book, Toxic Free, which I am autographing today with today’s date, so you’ll have an autographed copy with the date of publication, which is today. Today is the very first day that these books are available. So those of you who get them today will be among the first on the planet to have them.

You can also, of course, buy my book at Amazon.com and perhaps your local bookstore, and it would be great for you to call your local bookstore and say that you want to order it, or do they have it, so that they know that people are interested in this subject.

We’re at the top of the hour now, almost, which is also the end of this first segment of Toxic Free Talk Radio. So the way this works today is that it’s 12 hours. We’re through the first two hours, and it’s in two hour-segments. So when we get to the end of each two hours, what we’ll need to do is switch over to a new show.

So I’m going to put on some music now for three minutes, and there may be a period of silence while this show ends, and I have to call in for the next one. But we’ll back in a few minutes with Toxic Free Talk Radio. Thanks for listening.

 

I first launched Toxic Free Talk Radio back in September 2011, to celebrate the publication of my book Toxic Free.

I did a marathon—12 hours straight!

9:00 hour – Larry Redalia, who has done all my nontoxic remodeling for 24 years, talks about our remodeling projects past and present.

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Toxic Free Talk Radio Marathon Hour #10

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Larry Redalia

Date of Broadcast: September 01, 2011

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. We’re doing a 12-hour marathon today to launch this radio show, Toxic Free Talk Radio and also my new book called Toxic Free.

I’ve written a lot about toxic chemicals over the years and this show will be weekly I think. I’m still working on scheduling.

And what we’re going to be talking about, what we have been talking about since noon today is toxic chemicals, their health effects and how you can remove toxic chemicals from your home and body and thereby regain your health and happiness.

We hear about toxic chemicals in the news almost every day now, but there is also a lot that isn’t toxic. And so we’re going to give you what the toxic dangers are just so that you can understand what you need to be watching out for. But what I’m really interested in and what really excites me is the fact that there are many, many, many toxic-free alternatives that range from just choosing a nontoxic product on the shelves in a store to whole different ways of living in harmony with nature and a whole different way of thinking about the world.

So in this hour, which is hour number 10, we’re going to talk with Larry Redalia about nontoxic building and remodeling.

Larry and I have been doing nontoxic remodeling on various houses for the past 24 years. We have been married. We currently are not married, but that doesn’t mean that we’re no longer friends because we are very good friends. We have been for a long time.

And Larry, in fact, is still even today working on remodeling my house in a nontoxic way. So we are going to talk about remodeling projects, past and present and about what it means to remodel something in a nontoxic way.

If you want to call in and ask us a question, the toll free number is (877) 497-1811. That’s (877) 497-1811. And that is toll free.

Hi Larry.

LARRY REDALIA: Hi Debra.

DEBRA: So, I’m going to ask you the question I’ve been asking everybody (because I think that this is an important question) what was the turning point for you about living in a toxic-free way? What changed your mind? I know the answer.

LARRY REDALIA: Interesting question. What changed my mind was I went to a lecture. My girlfriend took me to a lecture given by Debra Lynn Dadd about toxic chemicals and that changed my mind about them because previously I was pretty clueless about it. I thought, “Well, it’s not good, thos toxic chemicals. But most of them aren’t that bad or they wouldn’t be still in use.” But Debra changed my mind. So, I realized that there were toxic chemicals and we could do something about them.

DEBRA: Well, this is very important actually because Larry is very good with his hands and knows how to do a lot of skills like building and repairing cars. Virtually everything that he was doing was exposing himself to toxic chemicals and a lot of things.

So, when I came along and said, “We don’t have to live with toxic chemicals,” he was right onboard. He left his girlfriend, came over to me. No, I didn’t steal him away. She actually introduced us. She brought him to the lecture because she thought that he actually belonged with me instead of her and she was right.

LARRY REDALIA: That’s right.

DEBRA: So, what was the first project we worked on?

LARRY REDALIA: Well, let’s see.

DEBRA: I remember painting my house.

LARRY REDALIA: Painting your house in [inaudible 00:05:21].

DEBRA: Painting my house. I had a little cottage out in the woods and I was about to rent it out and go on a trip to the British Isles. So I thought that I’d paint it and I hired Larry to come and do the painting. This was in 1987. We used one of the first low VOC paint, didn’t we?

LARRY REDALIA: I believe we did, a low VOC latex paint.

DEBRA: Yeah. And how did you like it?

LARRY REDALIA: It was much better to use a low VOC paint because you don’t have to breathe the toxic fumes as you’re in the room painting it. It’s much nicer.

DEBRA: Yeah. So then what did we do after that? Then we moved to…

LARRY REDALIA: San Francisco.

DEBRA: San Francisco, but we didn’t do any work in San Francisco, did we?

LARRY REDALIA: No.

DEBRA: No. And then we moved to various rental places where we didn’t do anything. And then we moved to Fort Knowles, California in West Moran where we had a different little cottage out in the woods. And we did something there. What did we do? The thing that comes to mind first is that we swapped out a lot of the doors and windows.

LARRY REDALIA: We swapped out the doors and windows. We swapped out the nasty carpet that was in there.

DEBRA: Oh, that was the first thing. Okay, I could tell you my carpet story.

LARRY REDALIA: Go ahead.

DEBRA: Let’s just start with that because that was the first thing chronologically. So we found this little house that was just adorable. It was on a little street where you go around the curve, in a forest, in a forest with big tall trees. You go around the curve. We went around the curve, I saw the house and I said, “That’s it. That’s it.” And we had been looking. We had been given notice and we had to move out. This was the last day for us to buy a house so that we could move out in time to meet our notice.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes.

DEBRA: And it was 4:00 in the afternoon and we drove around the curve and I said, “That’s the house.” It just took my breath away. And this little cabin out in the forest, we walked in and it had avocado green shag carpet throughout the whole house. It was terrible.

But I knew that I could repair carpets. And so we bought the house.

And on the very first day before we even moved in, I pulled up the carpet. We were both pulling at the carpet. We have had a pest infection. It was clean and there was no problem with it. We ripped out the carpet and carpenter ants started crawling out in every direction. The floor was damaged underneath the carpet, so much so that had we not taken up the carpet, one day, the floor would have collapsed under me.

And so, we had to replace a section of the floor, but we ripped out all the carpet. And then we put in hardwood floors, wood floors.

LARRY REDALIA: Parquet floors.

DEBRA: Parquet floors. And at the time, this was in 1980. No, 1990.

LARRY REDALIA: 1990.

DEBRA: 1990.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah.

DEBRA: At the time, you could buy oak parquet (you can’t buy them anymore), oak parquet that was just strips of oaks that were wired together. There was no glue and they were pre-finished. We glued them down with Elmer’s white glue or yellow glue.

LARRY REDALIA: We used Elmer’s white glue.

DEBRA: Yeah, the white glue then. That first time, we used Elmer’s white glue.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes.

DEBRA: And when we left 12 years later, that floor was still in good condition. And that white glue, you couldn’t get them off the floor.

LARRY REDALIA: Well, there was one problem. We had a [skylight] that was leaking and it did come up in that area. We had to do a repair. We used a yellow glue called Elmer’s Titebond II, I think.

DEBRA: It’s not Elmer’s. Titebond is a different company.

LARRY REDALIA: That’s right. It was Titebond II. It’s a wood glue, also very non-toxic and waterproof.

DEBRA: That’s right. So nowadays, when we lay the floor, we use Titebond because it’s waterproof. And Elmer’s white glue, if you soak some water on it, it won’t stay. So that’s why we use Titebond, but it’s very nontoxic.

So that was great. And then we started replacing doors and windows. And what we did was we went down to the local salvage yard in the San Francisco Bay area. There are great salvage yards because there are a lot of great houses in the San Francisco area. And so, all of these old doors and windows were just beautiful, just beautiful.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah. I remember on the front door, which was actually fairly short, we couldn’t find a door that short. So, we wanted to have some glass in the front so you could see through it and to let in some light. So we just cut a hole in it the size of some [inaudible 00:10:47] down another door that was a whole different size, and put it in that door.

DEBRA: And it was a beautiful glass. Didn’t it have bevelled glass?

LARRY REDALIA: It was bevelled glass, yeah.

DEBRA: Yeah, this little 9-pane with bevelled glass in it. It was just beautiful.

And none of these was toxic in any way. We had to scrape. We had to watch out for old [inaudible 00:11:07] paint, but we wore masks and things like that. It was a particle hazard, not a vapor hazard. And then we put them in the house and painted over them and we loved it. It was great.

So then, what did we do? We put in a new kitchen.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes, a whole kitchen.

DEBRA: A whole kitchen, yeah. This was a very tiny kitchen. The area measured only six by nine and then there was a cabinetry around it. But the problem here was that we needed to have some cabinets that were not made of particleboard.

And so what we did was we have them custom-built. We had a local cabinet maker. And at the time, we made them out of pine – Knotty Pine, right? Yeah, it was Knotty Pine.

LARRY REDALIA: It was pine. I don’t think it was Knotty Pine.

DEBRA: You don’t think it was Knotty Pine?

LARRY REDALIA: No.

DEBRA: I thought it was because we had a Knotty Pine paneling.

LARRY REDALIA: We had a Knotty Pine paneling with too many knobs and [inaudible 00:12:09].

DEBRA: But we did have pine. We used pine for the cabinets. And by the time, the small local cabinet maker, one-man shop, custom-made all of our cabinets, it priced about the same as the particleboard cabinets from Home Depot.

So, custom-cabinets rate does not have to be expensive. And he actually built each cabinet. He didn’t just make some pre-built cabinets fit. He actually made them from scratch. And so knew that they were totally solid wood.

And he actually introduced us to a wood finish that we used for many years called Varathane Diamond Finish. I’m not sure that it’s sold under that name anymore. But that was one of the least VOC finishers that existed at the time and for a long time since.

Let’s see. What else about that? Countertops, people ask me often about countertops. And what we did for that one is we found some salvaged stones.

LARRY REDALIA: Some marbles.

DEBRA: Marbles?

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah.

DEBRA: And it had seashells in it.

LARRY REDALIA: Mm-hmmm…

DEBRA: They only had 96 pieces, that was it. They had 96 pieces. And it had purple veins in it. I remember now. Okay. It has purple veins in it and seashells. You could see the little spiral shells and it has little quartz crystals growing inside the shells. It was great.

So, we used those 12 x 12 tiles for the countertops and then we used the rest of them for the kitchen floor. And [inaudible 00:13:57] six pieces.

LARRY REDALIA: That’s right. We didn’t have much left at all.

DEBRA: No. And we just set all those tiles in mortar which was completely nontoxic. And what else did we do in that kitchen?

LARRY REDALIA: Glass tiles around the edges?

DEBRA: Yeah. Often, when you’re installing tiles, the most difficult part is to cut all the tiles whether it’s wood or ceramic or stone. The most difficult part is to cut the edges because it never fits exactly. And the room was [inaudible 00:14:33] of 12 by 12 tiles.

And so what we did was we took the 12 tiles that we had and we put them in the middle of the room and then we got little glass ceramic tiles, one inch by one inch and we laid it down around the edge. That was very easy to fit. We didn’t have to do any cuts at all. And it has the effect of looking like there was a rug in the center. It was designed wisely. It was very lovely.

Wasn’t it? Didn’t you laid that floor?

LARRY REDALIA: It turned out beautifully.

DEBRA: Yeah. It worked out really, really well. So what else did we do?

LARRY REDALIA: Well, we replaced all the floors. We talked about – oh, the doors for your office, those [inaudible 00:15:14] we got.

DEBRA: Yeah, we’ve talked about those, but there is nothing particularly…

LARRY REDALIA: The shape of them.

DEBRA: The shape of them is called the camel back. I don’t know. It’s quite hard to describe it if you don’t know what a camel back is. But it’s got a hump in the middle and then it comes down and these were actually church windows and we put them in as doors.

And then months later, there was another door. And what we were doing was we were replacing the ugly aluminum slider doors. We wanted French doors because we wanted something unusual. And how much? It was $100 for both of those doors, right?

LARRY REDALIA: At the time, yes.

DEBRA: Yeah. And then months later, we wanted to replace the other sliding door on that same side of the house. We found another little ste of doors that was smaller, but it had that same camel back on it. This is like a completely different time and place.

LARRY REDALIA: The door is about 100 years old [inaudible 00:16:14].

DEBRA: Yeah. And I had never seen another camel back door. So that was very cool. What else? So then we decided that we were going to remodel the bathroom.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes.

DEBRA: And again, salvage, we decided that we were going to have tile. We wanted to tile the whole thing. I went to the salvage yard one day and there was a whole crate of this beautiful white handmade tile, artisan tile. And the whole crate and that’s tile, the floors and ceilings and walls of the whole entire bathroom was $80.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah.

DEBRA: It’s completely nontoxic.

And so, I decided one day that I wanted to buy some absinthe tile. And I went to this very swanky store in Berkeley and I took in one of my tiles. I said, “I want an absinthe tile to go with this. This is my field tile.” She said, “Oh, did you buy that here?” And I said, “No.” And then she said, “Oh, we have it,” and she took me over to and they had it. And it was $15 a square foot. I got the whole bathroom full for $80.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah.

DEBRA: Totally nontoxic.

LARRY REDALIA: You probably paid $0.25 a square foot for it.

DEBRA: Something like that. So Larry, talk about mastic and mortar.

LARRY REDALIA: Mastic is this lovely toxic stuff that you use to put tiles down. I don’t use it. I much prefer mortar. Mortar is basically a cement type of material. The Romans actually set tile in the cement and mortar and they didn’t use any mastic.

The reason they’re not around anymore was – it wasn’t the mastic

DEBRA: Wasn’t it the lead and the…

LARRY REDALIA: They had pipes with the water. Yeah. So, the thing that did them in was not the mastic. Anyway, when you open a can of mastic and smell it, if you have any nose left at all, you’ll just close your eye back up and say, “Let’s try something else.” Anyway, the mortar is very nontoxic and it doesn’t smell at all. I put all my tiles down with mortar and not mastic.

DEBRA: Now I just want to say something about mortar because things have changed today. It used to be that mortar was sold as mortar and the cement part. And then there was something called latex additives that you could optionally put into the mortar.

LARRY REDALIA: That still exists.

DEBRA: Well, I don’t know of a commercial mortar that doesn’t already have latex additives blended in. But this is the new thing. You might not be aware of this yet.

LARRY REDALIA: You’d have to look hard to find one. It doesn’t have that latex additive in it.

DEBRA: Yeah. I and my readers have not yet found it.

LARRY REDALIA: Okay.

DEBRA: But you can mix up your own mortar and mix up your own grout and have it be nontoxic. But this is a case of – you know toxic chemicals just appear in products, and so you have to be vigilant so that you aren’t buying things that you think are okay and they’ve been changed.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes. You need to look at those labels.

DEBRA: Yeah.

LARRY REDALIA: Latex is not as toxic as some of the things, so it’s fine. But it is toxic too to a degree and we avoid it when it’s possible.

DEBRA: Yeah. So what else about that house? What about the bathroom? Is there anything else about the bathroom?

LARRY REDALIA: We didn’t finish it.

DEBRA: Yeah, we didn’t finish that bathroom because as we were working on it, our across-the-street neighbors sold their house and it happened to be a very comparable house for our house. And we saw how much money they sold their house for and we said, “It’s time move. It’s time to sell the house.” And we sold our house in two days and it didn’t have a finished bathroom.

LARRY REDALIA: That’s right. The plastic sheets are around where the shower was. So you take a shower…

DEBRA: Yes, plastic tarp instead of – there wasn’t even any tile in the shower because we were doing all this building to make the shape of the bathroom different and make the shower – we wanted the shower to be different. So it was quite a mess.

But we sold the house and the people who bought it loved it .They were up for the remodeling and they finished it.

And then we moved to Florida. We had another bathroom. I guess we didn’t finish that bathroom. We were [stated] to have to remodel another bathroom. What happened with this bathroom was that it actually hasn’t been built correctly. The plumbing, there was something wrong with the plumbing. And so the plumbing was leaking inside the wall and we didn’t know it until the tiles installed in 1940 started falling off the wall.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah. It’s not because it wasn’t installed correctly. The plumbing just gave out after 60 years.

DEBRA: But I thought of something that I thought was very clever. We didn’t do that on this house. But in an old house – where were we? Was it the Winchester mystery house where they had a little door on the other side of where the pipes were installed? So on the shower side, it was all tiled. But then on the other side, you could open the door and repair the pipes.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah. It looks like a little door for an ironing board or something.

DEBRA: Yeah. And when we were in [inaudible 00:22:21], the bathroom that we didn’t finish, the shower was on an outside wall. And so we put in one of the little doors on the outside so that we could access our plumbing in the future.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah.

DEBRA: I thought that that was just an excellent idea.

LARRY REDALIA: That way, you can change the valves or repair the pipes without tearing apart the whole shower tiled wall.

DEBRA: Yeah. And in modern construction, if something goes wrong inside the wall, you need a new bathroom.

LARRY REDALIA: Essentially, yeah. And you don’t learn about it very quickly either. You can’t open a door and see.

DEBRA: No, because you can’t open the door and see. You can’t.

So what happened here was that we started having a big mold problem and we could smell them all day and that’s what’s making us sick in our house. And so we had to whip out everything in the bathroom down to the [inaudible 00:23:17]. And even the floor, all the floor came up. I used to have some pictures on the website of all this and they’ll probably be there again.

But we had to have a whole entire mold remediation. We had mold remediators come in hazmat suits. They put a plastic door on the bathroom with a zipper in it and a fan so that the molds would not get into the rest of the house. It was a very interesting indoor air quality exercise.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes. They didn’t let the molds to get into the rest of the house, into the AC system and spread throughout the whole house.

DEBRA: Yes. So if you have this kind of problem that needs to be handled, then you want to make sure that you get a mold remediation company that really knows how to do this. It’s very, very important. Our guys were really, really good. Make sure that you get recommendations from people that you know have already experienced this and that they know what they’re doing because you don’t want to get mold in the rest of your house.

LARRY REDALIA: No. You need to replace all your air conditioning, ducting. You don’t want to do that too on top of rebuilding the bathroom or wherever the mold is.

DEBRA: Okay. So there were some adventures in doing this. So after they removed the molds, then they wanted to paint antimicrobial paint to all over everything.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes.

DEBRA: I was against that, but I did find out that the antimicrobial agent was silver. It wasn’t something that was volatile.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes.

DEBRA: And so I allowed them to go ahead and do that. And the paint itself was water-based. And so, it wasn’t very toxic to have them apply the paint. The anti-microbial was silver. And so, it was all fine! But even if it wasn’t, it was all covered up with tile anyway.

So, what we decided for our bathroom was to tile it all around not just the shower, but the tiles, every wall surface at seven feet. Our house had nine foot ceilings, right?

LARRY REDALIA: That’s right.

DEBRA: And so we put in white subway tile all around the whole entire bathroom; and then above, because we wanted to not have any water to get on the walls.

LARRY REDALIA: Right. We did that for the walls. The floors have different tiles on them.

DEBRA: That’s right. And at the juncture of where the floor meets the wall, instead of using some polyvinyl chloride baseboard, what we used were marble strips.

Here in Florida, they sell strips of marble very inexpensively at places like Home Depot and Lowe’s to use as windowsills because it’s so humid here that the windowsills, [inaudible 00:26:41], just evaporates.

LARRY REDALIA: No. You get dry rot.

DEBRA: Yeah.

LARRY REDALIA: They get wet, they rot.

DEBRA: Yeah, that’s what happens. And so we took those windowsills and repurposed them for another use.

And so, essentially, what we have in the bathroom is a completely watertight area. So you could take a hose and hose it down and water would not get beyond that tile barrier.

LARRY REDALIA: That’s right, it’s very watertight up to about seven feet.

DEBRA: Yeah. So tell me about the shower pan.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah, the shower pan was an interesting experience. We don’t have a tub in that bathroom. We just have a very large shower that’s about three feet x six feet and it’s all tiles.

It was interesting to find out the technology to do this. I did a search on the web quite a bit before I found some instructions that actually made sense and agreed with each other and directions you could actually follow to build a shower pan. I did so and it works beautifully.

Again around the edges of the shower, we put the baseboard where the shower doors slide. We covered those with marble that they use for the windowsills here. We repurposed them and used them for edging our new shower.

DEBRA: And so there’s actually no carpet in the bathroom, isn’t there?

LARRY REDALIA: There’s carpet on the shower doors.

DEBRA: Carpet on the shower doors, but that’s all. And so all the other areas are all water-tight with mortar.

LARRY REDALIA: And grout.

DEBRA: And grout, yes. And we also have…

LARRY REDALIA: Oh, we also found a nontoxic grout sealer. It’s a lot because grout sealers are some of the most toxic things and people often have trouble with them especially if they’re chemically sensitive. We found one from – was it AFM?

DEBRA: Yes, AFM.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah. Their grout sealer is excellent. It goes on very easily, seals very well. It doesn’t smell at all. Beautiful stuff to work with.

DEBRA: Now, another design feature we put in was a skylight over the shower. And that’s not only visually appealing (especially when around noon when the sun shines directly down through it at certain times of year), but it also gives –

Usually bathrooms are these little small areas that don’t have a lot of airflow and light. There’s also a lot of water. The combination of no air flow, darkness and wetness is the ideal environment for molds to grow. And then, we need to use all these toxic chemicals to clean the molds.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes.

DEBRA: So, what we did instead was we put in a big skylight. It’s about as big as the shower.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes, very close.

DEBRA: And so it lets in a lot of light. We had no mold problem at all.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah, there’s no mold problem there at all.

We also put in a ventilation fan so that when you turn on the light, it vents the outside. So we don’t have any problems with any molds in the bathroom at all.

I think this is only [inaudible 00:30:14] for any length of time that didn’t have some sort of a mold problem with it.

DEBRA: Yes, but there is no mold here at all. And so that’s an example of using a design feature to control toxic chemicals, the use of toxic chemicals in the future because we just don’t need to use them.

Another thing that we did in the bathroom that I totally, totally love is instead of painting the walls – remember the bathroom walls are tiled up to seven feet. And then above that, there’s wall that needed to be painted. But instead of using paint, we used colored clay plaster.

This was absolutely brilliant because not only is the color gorgeous (we picked kind of a sky blue, it’s all natural pigments), not only is the color gorgeous, but the clay plaster actually absorbs moisture from the air and then releases it back out as the air in the bathroom gets drier.

LARRY REDALIA: That’s right.

DEBRA: And so there is no accumulation of condensation that can grow mold because the water is trapped in this clay. And that’s what clay does. It absorbs moisture.

LARRY REDALIA: That’s right.

DEBRA: So, it turned out it’s the perfect wall surface for a bathroom, just perfect, perfect.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah.

DEBRA: We got this idea of tiling all around up to seven feet from visiting Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West.

LARRY REDALIA: That’s right. He had tiles up to about that high.

DEBRA: Yeah, all the way around. We just remembered that when it was time to do our bathroom.

Let’s see what else. Oh, we had a stainless steel medicine cabinet. We really had to look for that because most medicine cabinets today are just made out of plastic and particle board.

We have the vanity. It’s solid wood. That’s another area where most vanities, especially inexpensive ones are made out of particle board and they’re leeching the formaldehyde for years and years and years. But ours is solid wood.

LARRY REDALIA: Our is solid wood. I think we bought it at IKEA, wasn’t it?

DEBRA: No, we bought it at [inaudible 00:32:45].

LARRY REDALIA: Oh, yes.

DEBRA: That was on sale.

LARRY REDALIA: That’s right.

DEBRA: And there was only one.

LARRY REDALIA: We only needed one.

DEBRA: Yes. And we have a porcelain sink that sits in there. And we had lead-free faucets.

LARRY REDALIA: And a dual flush toilet.

DEBRA: And a dual flush toilet. That doesn’t have anything to do with toxicity. And we had cotton towels. Can you think of anything else?

LARRY REDALIA: Glass shower doors instead of…

DEBRA: Oh, glass shower doors instead of PVC shower curtains. This was a big thing and very important to me because I didn’t want the PVC shower curtain. I had a cotton shower curtain that molded. I couldn’t keep ahead of the mold, and I didn’t want that anymore.

As it turns out, you can buy glass shower doors at a place like Home Depot or Lowe’s for less than $100. And I think that that’s the perfect solution. They last forever.

The only other solution that I like is that IKEA actually sells a shower curtain for about $2 or $3 made out of a nontoxic plastic called PVA. So those are the solutions for showers. It’s either the PVA curtains or glass doors, but I’m really glad that we had our glass doors.

And we clean our glass doors with the hard water [inaudible 00:34:20] on them. But we clean them with a product called… oh, something X.

LARRY REDALIA: [Fod-X], I think.

DEBRA: [Fod-X]. I think it’s Fod-X. But it’s made from little seashells and it doesn’t scratch. It’s completely nontoxic.

Everything that we use in the bathroom to clean it is nontoxic.

And so we have this perfect and beautiful nontoxic, toxic-free bathroom.

LARRY REDALIA: That’s right.

DEBRA: Anything else you want to say about the bathroom?

LARRY REDALIA: You even got it in the magazine. What was that magazine?

DEBRA: It was in two magazines. One was Natural Living (which is no longer publishing). I do not remember what the other one was. But it really is a beautiful bathroom.

LARRY REDALIA: And the big [inaudible 00:35:05] with pictures, it’s quite impressive.

DEBRA: Yeah. Yes. One thing I do want to say about living in a toxic-free way is that we choose everything for being nontoxic, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be dull or boring or not artistic. And both of us are very artistic people.

Larry is telling me a little private joke here.

Both of us are very artistic and so we want things to look beautiful and aesthetically pleasing at the same time. There are many, many building and finishing materials that can look wonderful. And so there’s really no deprivation for me. Is there any deprivation for you in living in a toxic-free way?

LARRY REDALIA: I’m deprived of all those toxic chemicals now.

DEBRA: Yeah, but you don’t need them.

LARRY REDALIA: No, I don’t need them. Actually, we were painting with a milk-based paint in the bedroom. And that paint is just incredibly easy to use. It doesn’t smell toxic at all. I was painting with the windows closed and Debra stayed in the house. She didn’t even have to leave.

DEBRA: Yeah. This was from the old-fashioned milk paint company. They started out with milk paint formulas from colonial times. They were used to paint furniture and things like that, but they developed a wall paint using the milk paint formula and it couldn’t be a nicer paint. We both just love it.

It just smells like milk! It really does smell like milk. It has that warm, just out of the cow milk smell. I mean it doesn’t smell like a cow, but it really smells like milk.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah. It didn’t smell like paint at all.

DEBRA: Like warm milk, like a cup of warm milk.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah.

DEBRA: And it looks beautiful. It looked totally beautiful. And I just love the fact that it’s a natural thing. It’s a natural material. And I just feel naturalness, that relaxation. When I walk in the room, it has a very similar feel to the clay paint, the clay plaster. Doesn’t it?

LARRY REDALIA: It’s very natural surfaces.

DEBRA: Yes. It’s natural. It’s very soft. It’s not like the hard finish of a petrochemical paint.

LARRY REDALIA: No.

DEBRA: One of those things about the clay plaster is that it can rub off a little bit. Doesn’t it?

LARRY REDALIA: It’s water soluble, so if you get a lot of water on it, it would run off. But we have a…

DEBRA: Rub off.

LARRY REDALIA: Run off.

DEBRA: No, I’m saying it would rub off if you touch it.

LARRY REDALIA: It would too. It’s a rough surface.

DEBRA: Yeah. Yes.

LARRY REDALIA: If you touch it a lot, it would rub off. Yeah.

DEBRA: The milk paint doesn’t rub off in the sunlight as the clay plaster. I was having a little hesitation about using clay plaster on a wall that’s on my [inaudible 00:38:16].

LARRY REDALIA: Sure.

DEBRA: But with the milk paint, it’s beautiful. I could see using it on every wall in my house.

And with the milk paint, it only comes in certain colors. It comes in a bag and you have to mix it up yourself. It only comes in certain colors and so the only colors you can have (they won’t color match), you have to have the natural colors that come from the natural pigments, which I totally love using the colors of the materials themselves.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes. And you just mix it up with water in a bucket with a paint stirrer.

DEBRA: …which was great. We’re very, very happy. I’m very, very happy with that paint. Very happy.

LARRY REDALIA: Beautiful paint.

DEBRA: Beautiful paint, yeah.

LARRY REDALIA: Both to look at and to use.

DEBRA: Yes, yes. No toxic chemicals, no crude oil-derived chemicals. It is all natural materials.

So, we also have a kitchen. We’ve been remodeling the kitchen and the kitchen, we decided to do the same thing with tiling up to seven feet because that used to be the way in Europeans kitchen – all European kitchens, they did that as well. We went to the Gamble House in Pasadena that was designed – it’s a very beautiful arts and crafts house. And their kitchen had white subway tiles up seven feet on the walls [inaudible 00:39:51].

LARRY REDALIA: You liked that closet, so we went with that in the kitchen.

DEBRA: Well, the thing is that both the kitchen and the bathroom are hygienic rooms where you need to be able to clean surfaces to control germs. And so what would be better than having an all tile room? So, we have new tile on the floor, we have the same trick with the baseboard, the marble baseboard. And we have tile up seven feet. And then we used regular paints above that for the last two feet up in the air.

LARRY REDALIA: I think it was a low VOC latex.

DEBRA: Was it Eco Spec?

LARRY REDALIA: Yes.

DEBRA: Yeah. Benjamin Moore Eco Spec?

LARRY REDALIA: Yes, exactly.

DEBRA: Yeah. Mostly, what we’ve been using is Eco Spec. We’ve also used Sherwin Williams Harmony, but we couldn’t get the colors that we wanted. So we’ve been using Eco Spec. We’ve also used Aura Paint from Benjamin Moore, Aura Paint.

And we liked that very much. I could even paint with that myself.

LARRY REDALIA: And you did.

DEBRA: And I did. I painted a whole set of kitchen cabinets.

We should talk about the rental cottage that we did. But is there anything else for the kitchen?

LARRY REDALIA: No.

DEBRA: We always do all of our remodeling on a shoestring. We do all the labor ourselves, so we’re not paying workmen to do it. But we’re always looking to see how we can save money when we can on materials. Particularly, we’re reusing things or buying architectural salvage materials.

There are costs in design. One of the things that we did was we chose a very inexpensive field tile for the walls, the white subway tiles, which we got very inexpensively at Home Depot. But then we’ll spend a couple of $100 on buying some really wonderful absinthe tiles. And when you look at those absinthe tiles, it makes it look very classy. And yet all those field tiles cost practically nothing. I know that people have it in their minds that tile is very expensive, but it’s not difficult to install tile yourself.

LARRY REDALIA: No.

DEBRA: And you can get inexpensive tilesm, you can get salvaged tiles. It’s all completely nontoxic.

LARRY REDALIA: Actually, Habitat For Humanity often has tiles available at very reasonable prices.

DEBRA: Habitat For Humanity has salvage stores across the nation. You can go to their website and get connected with them. We have a couple of them here in the Tampa Bay area where we live. And it’s one of the first places that we go when we’re looking for things. They do have tiles. That’s one of the things that are abundant.

I think a lot of people don’t know this, but in construction jobs, they buy more materials than are needed to make sure that they have enough. And then these salvage places get the overrun.

LARRY REDALIA: It’s exactly what happens.

DEBRA: And salvaged isn’t necessarily used. It’s just material that isn’t needed. And so you can go and get these beautiful things and pay practically nothing for them.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes, it’s actually a way to get a good price on tiles.

DEBRA: One of the things we did to save money in the kitchen was to reuse our cabinets. We did not get new kitchen cabinets. We did quite a lot of working at kitchen cabinets, but there was nothing wrong with our kitchen cabinets. And so we just kept them, we painted them and we put new hardware on them. So the kitchen is all finished up, but we didn’t spend that much money.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes, we did actually build a rather shelf on one wall where there had been a pantry which was practically unusable because it was very difficult to walk into it. It had no light.

DEBRA: Yeah.

LARRY REDALIA: So, we took that out and built a whole wall of cabinets to match the other cabinets. And they were just made out of pine.

DEBRA: Yeah. So it’s actually pretty easy to do these things if you’re handy at all. I mean, Larry is a very excellent builder.

He has very good building skills. But I think probably anyone who put their minds to it could go ahead and do these things.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes. One of the things when doing a remodel is you want to match what’s there in the same character of what’s out there. So take a close look at what you have. And if you’re building a cabinet, make it look like that.

DEBRA: We have these cabinets that are existing in the kitchen. And then, we wanted to build something that matched them. My preference is to have open shelving on the top. I don’t like opening cabinet doors. So one of the first things we did on this kitchen is we took all the doors off and just have open shelves. So, instead of building a whole case cabinet, we built a wall of shelves to use as a pantry and it’s all open so that I can see everything and take things out. I had my jars with meds and things in them. It’s all very visually appealing.

So, in order to make it match and look like it was always there, across the top at the upper cabinets, there was a trim molding. And so what we did was we just took the old molding off. No, wait. This one, we got a match. Do you think we got the match on that one or no?

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah, we actually did. It’s a very close match.

DEBRA: We did? It’s a very, very close match. So the thing that united it visually was that we had this brand new shelving unit, but it had molding that exactly – you can’t help it that it isn’t exactly the same as the old cabinet. So, it looks like [inaudible 00:46:27] installed at the same time. It’s very integrated.

LARRY REDALIA: That’s right.

DEBRA: Yeah.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah, we went through remodeling [inaudible 00:46:35] there, so it all looks like one piece instead of tacked on different ages and stuff.

DEBRA: Yeah. And again, we used pines, inexpensive pine shelvings in order to make these shelves, yeah.

And in the kitchen, we had a [med] room off the kitchen and I wanted more storage space. And so it had a little bathroom that was just horrible, just horrible. It was like a toilet closet.

LARRY REDALIA: Bright pink, exactly.

DEBRA: Bright pink, [inaudible 00:47:16]. I didn’t like that from day one. And so, finally, I got Larry to just take all that out and give me more kitchen storage space. We got a butcher block island from IKEA and then he built a hutch for me to go on top. So, it looks like a French country built-in thing. And that was a combination of finding a solid wood, an existing piece of furniture and then building onto it.

And we did that same thing in the dining room where we bought a set of drawers from an unfinished furniture store. And then he built the hutch to go on there for the dining room. So we’ve been pretty creative about things.

Let’s talk about the cottage.

LARRY REDALIA: Okay. We have a rental cottage and we’ve been busily remodeling that. Again, one of the first things we did was we took out all the old, tacky carpet, which is often in rentals. We took that away and repaired the floor and put in parquet flooring, wood parquet flooring over 90% of the house, something like that.

DEBRA: Yes.

LARRY REDALIA: So, it’s got wood floors now, hard wood floors instead of the rental carpet.

DEBRA: And tile in the bathroom of the kitchen?

LARRY REDALIA: And then the back of the kitchen, we put down the ceramic tiles. The pattern looks like a Navajo pattern in the backroom with these little two inch ceramic tiles, white and tan color. It looks very good.

We’re putting a low flow toilet to retile all around the shower area, around the tub. We kept the same tub and the plumbing because it was working fine.

DEBRA: But we put in the tiles to make it look fresh. And it was very inexpensive to buy that tile, again, with closeout tile.

LARRY REDALIA: That’s the best way to buy tiles. Be sure to have enough to do the project you want because you may have trouble finding it again if they no longer have that closeout tile.

DEBRA: That’s right.

LARRY REDALIA: Let’s see what else do we do there.

DEBRA: Well, we used the Benjamin Moore Aura Pain. That was where I painted the kitchen cabinets and they looked like beautiful new cabinets instead of these old, tacky cabinets. But actually they didn’t even match. I put paint all over it and the paint united everything (and new knobs and hardware. It looks great. It looks great.

LARRY REDALIA: We had granite countertops put in there because there was no [inaudible 00:50:11] formica in there, and that wasn’t going to fly. So we got some beautiful granite countertops for the kitchen.

DEBRA: They were on sale.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes.

DEBRA: And then we went to move out. And the renter actually did not do a good job taking care of our wood floors. So Larry recently has been sending all the wood floors in the small 800 square foot house and refinishing them.

We used the Varathane Crystal Clear floor finish. And that works very, very well. Everybody who walks in saw how beautiful the floors are. And it dries very fast and it doesn’t smell, hardly at all.

LARRY REDALIA: It has very low odor.

DEBRA: Very low odor.

LARRY REDALIA: This was not the oil-based one. This is water-based.

DEBRA: It’s called Crystal Clear I think. I just looked it up.

LARRY REDALIA: Okay.

DEBRA: What else?

LARRY REDALIA: Well, we had to replace a couple of doors. That’s not a big deal.

DEBRA: Oh, we did have to replace interior doors and we made sure that we got the kind that doesn’t have the particle board on the inside of the doors.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes. A lot of doors now have particleboard inside. We didn’t want to put that inside our nontoxic-remodeled house.

DEBRA: Yes. We were very dedicated to make sure that everything that we did to this house was not going to be toxic, and we really accomplished that. And we accomplished it on a budget. So it’s totally something that can be done.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes. We did it and proved it could be done.

DEBRA: Yeah. So I’ve had so much attention talking to you about all of this that I didn’t do any of my station breaks here.

LARRY REDALIA: Oh, go ahead. Keep running.

DEBRA: We’re almost through with our hour. We only have less than 10 minutes left. So, I will just say again that this is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and we’re talking to my very good friend and former husband, Larry Redalia who has been remodeling houses with me for the past 24 years.

We know that remodeling in a nontoxic way totally can be done as well as building things. And we like to take older house that needs a little care and to make them new in a nontoxic way.

So we’re here tonight having a 12 hour marathon of Toxic Free Talk Radio for two reasons – one to launch this new radio show where the purpose is to talk about toxic chemicals, their health effects and how you can remove them from your home and your body. We’re doing that until midnight tonight to show the many ways that are available for us to live toxic-free.

Another thing I wanted to talk to you about Larry that I forgot is we’ve been talking earlier about taking activated liquid Zeolite. I was talking with Dr. Melendez this afternoon about how that can be taken even with people whose detox systems have been damaged. I’d like you to just talk for a minute about your experience taking this and what happened.

LARRY REDALIA: Well, I work around a fair amount of toxic chemicals at times if I’m repairing a car or mowing a lawn or something like that. There’s not much of a way to do that non-toxic, so I was exposed to a fair amount of stuff like that.

And I was getting run down and tired and I started taking liquid Zeolite. I was like, “Wow, this is going all better. I can work longer hours. I feel better.” It was great.

DEBRA: Wait! He’s being modest here. Okay, so this is a person who would like to do some work for five or six hours and then lie in bed for the rest of the day not because he’s a lazy bum, but because that’s how his body was feeling. And he went from that to working 9 to 10 hours, seven days a week in the middle of summer in a 90 degrees heat. And he’s 55 years old.

LARRY REDALIA: Fifty-seven.

DEBRA: He was 56 years old last year when this was going on. So this was a huge amount of difference.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah. And I noticed also I ran out of that activated liquid Zeolite about 10 days ago. I went without for about a week. I was feeling rundown and tired and cranky and irritable and I thought, “Well, I should take it again.” So, a couple of days ago, I started taking it again. I am already feeling a lot better. It does an excellent job of pulling the toxic chemicals out of your system.

DEBRA: Yeah. And this is a man who spent a lot of years being exposed to toxic chemicals doing things like painting and repairing cars and all these kind of things. So, I think that you actually have a lot of toxic chemicals in your body and that it’s important to get them out because you feel so much better. I can see it. You feel so much better when you’re doing things to remove the toxic chemicals.

LARRY REDALIA: Yeah. If I hadn’t been exposed to toxic chemicals, I wouldn’t feel any different taking them out.

DEBRA: That’s true. We’ve all been exposed to toxic chemicals. There isn’t a person or an animal or plant or anything in the world that’s alive today that hasn’t been exposed to toxic chemicals.

LARRY REDALIA: Yes. So don’t go dipping your hand and painting with them.

DEBRA: No, no. Most people don’t.

LARRY REDALIA: Okay.

DEBRA: But you have done that. You have done that.

So, we know from first time experience, those of us with over at least 24 years for Larry and longer than that for me, that we can live in a nontoxic way and also remove toxic chemicals from our bodies and feel better by doing that.

I want to just talk about this desk that I’m sitting at because it’s so beautiful. It’s made from oak. It’s an old library table from Stanford University. And most desks are very hard to find because lot of them are made from particle board. But this one is solid oak. It’s very heavy. And it was in a salvage yard because the edges have been damaged. And probably – I don’t know, I think it was water damage. And so it was coming apart…

LARRY REDALIA: They were beat up on the edges.

DEBRA: They were really beat up on the edges. And what Larry did was that he sawed off about an inch.

LARRY REDALIA: An inch and a half.

DEBRA: About an inch and a half all the way around the table and then he edged it with his beautiful wood called Purple Heart which actually is purple and it’s one of the hardest woods in the world. And then he put on – I think what we were using then was diamond finish.

LARRY REDALIA: Diamond.

DEBRA: Another thing, diamond finish. And once the diamond finish dried, I’ve been – how many years have I been using this stuff? We brought it here from California. Ten, eleven or twelve years?

LARRY REDALIA: Something like that.

DEBRA: Yeah. And it’s just very nontoxic and very serviceable to me.

So I wanted to tell you all these things to give you an example of how we actually achieve this. I don’t have a beautiful desk, a creative desk because I found it in a store. It’s a nontoxic desk. I found it in the store. It’s because we found the materials and did something with it.

LARRY REDALIA: We created it.

DEBRA: We created it. We used our creativity. And so, my experience is anything that I want to have in a nontoxic way, I can figure out a way to do that. So anything else you want to say, Larry? We have about a minute.

LARRY REDALIA: Oh, one thing we didn’t mention was my vegetable oil powered car I drive around in. I got an old Mercedes diesel that I converted to run on vegetable oil, which lessens our dependence on crude oil and it’s a sustainable product. We drove across the country twice in it using vegetable oil all the way and it’s quite an adventure to…

DEBRA: It was.

LARRY REDALIA: …go driving by gas stations.

DEBRA: A lot of fun. A lot of fun. So we need to go.

So, the way this marathon is organized is it’s 12 hours, but it’s made up of six two hour shows and some in between shows.

We’re about to start show number six. So, I’m going to give you some music for about two and a half minutes and there’s going to be a little silence. And then I have to call in again and then we will continue with our number 11 with Harmony Susalla talking about textiles.

This is Debra Lynn Dadd, Toxic Free Talk Radio.