“We can’t live without water, but it can be a real pain.”

The HVAC system (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning) is the lungs of your house. There’s some fascinating work looking at the microbe colonies that life on and around our bodies – when you enter a work environment, your colonies mix with those of your coworkers, and over time they become more uniform. If your house or work recirculates air, that’s a much more dramatic process: if it takes in air from outside, then you’ll get more exposure to different microbes. This may help increase your resistance to some things, and make for a healthier environment – work is ongoing.

There, something you may never have thought about. I was reminded of these studies reading Mike Holmes’ book (the Holmes Manual, of course) on home renovations: he very much sees a house as a living organism, one that must be allowed to breath easily. Not a perspective I usually take.

Holmes is a bit of a cult figure in Canada, with multiple TV shows to his name. His book is not really a DIY guide: Holmes only believes in doing work to the highest possible standard, often to a level beyond what the everyday homeowner could achieve. As a guide to the best possible solution to any household problem though, the gold standard of construction if you will, he’s excellent. He spends most of his time on parts of the house homeowners may never see, including the HVAC, foundations, attics, and roofs: he wisely suggests that if you do good work on these parts of the house, you carefully document and photograph it, so that for resale you can provide evidence. Often, such investments can more than pay for themselves, in value at sale and in savings in energy bills (particularly in Canada), but without evidence people tend to assume mediocre work at best, since that is the norm.

The Holmes Manual is an unusual book for this blog, I know, but I happened to pick it up – better, I sometimes think, to read the wisest book from many different disciplines, then hit diminishing marginal returns by reading too many in the same field.