Our Story

Hi, we're Jen and Alain.

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We built The Haven at Terre de Vie for our own family while we were all recovering from mold illness, PANS, Lyme disease, CIRS, MCAS, and cancer. We know what it's like to need a place that doesn't make you sicker. We spent years looking for one, before we finally gave up and built it ourselves.
 

Now that our family has healed and moved into our own house up the hill, we're offering this home to the wider community as a place for other healing families to breathe clean air, reset their nervous systems, and figure out their next steps, without the added burden of an environment working against them.

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We are both are versed in build science and building biology. We built the home ourselves to meticulous, healthy standards.

 

Jen offers Healthy New Build guidance through Practical Healthy Homes, LLC. ​​She runs the Facebook group Beyond Build Defects: Building a New Healthy Home.  She works on educational strategy for the Building Biology Institute of North America Board of Directors. The book she wrote, Destination Blue Sky, talks about how Jen and Alain healed their own family from PANS, mold and environmental illness, Lyme and co-infections, and cancer, by camping for four years while they built The Haven at Terre de Vie. They hope to save others from camping for years on end, as they had to do.