THE LAND
Terre de Vie is nestled on 60 acres of permaculture forest in the Sierra foothills, just 2 hours from the Bay Area and an hour from Sacramento.
It sits between the Sierra Nevada playground and the bountiful Central Valley in northern California. Hiking, swimming holes, kayaking, and Kirkwood ski resort are all in our backyard. Local farms offer everything from apples to zinnias. For wine aficionados, Amador County is home to the Shenandoah Valley. Award-winning allergy-friendly restaurants abound.
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THE HOME
"Build Tight, Ventilate Right"
Our rental homes are carefully built to create healthy, comfortable indoor air quality. The foundation has a taped Stego vapor barrier and good drainage. The house is framed with Zip-R Sheathing and taped Advantech subfloor and Intello air barrier. We used Rockwool insulation, paperless drywall, and a tiled Schluter membrane around the shower. The home is heated and cooled with minisplits, which we clean on a regular basis. It has a Zehnder Heat Recovery Ventilator that constantly brings in filtered, conditioned fresh air from the tree-filled canyon just outside the door. All of the wiring was done with metal clad cable. Every room has at least one ethernet connection and the main electrical panel is equipped an EMFSafe cutoff switch to create an EMF-free sleep sanctuary. All of our building materials and finishes are low-VOC and have had time to offgas. There are HEPA air filters in every room. Bi-weekly housekeeping is included with the price of the rental.
THE HOSTS
Hi! We're Jen and Alain.
When our kids got very sick with PANS and Lyme disease, and we unexpectedly found mold in our living environment, we set out to find a safe place to heal. Our family traveled the country in search of clean air, and camped for almost four years while we found land in clean air and built our first home. We are building rentals on our hard-won clean air land to ease the way forward for other families who find themselves in a similar situation.
Jen is the author of Destination Blue Sky, a book about the importance of a healthy home. She is a certified Permaculture consultant and a Building Biologist in training.
Alain is a full time software engineer. After realizing that it was impossible to hire a contractor to build with the attention to detail we required, he called on his own precise engineering skills to become the general contractor for our healthy homes.