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.