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I'm Nathan Verning and this is my wife, Jennifer, and we are here at our home in St. Jacob, Illinois

We have a family of four. It's my husband and I, and we have two small children, Gracie who is seven, and Addie who's five.

Our days our really fun-filled, packed days. We do homeschool here, so usually our mornings are starting off with school.

Our girls are–they're exciting, full of energy, wonderful. Can't imagine life without them.

Our vision for this house was to create something that we would be able to have long-term with a lot of natural light and air quality that was really good.

We have eight VELUX No Leak Solar Powered Fresh Air Skylights in this house. My biggest goal through this project was the energy efficiency.

My name is Jeff Day. I'm the architect that designed the Verning's home here in St. Jacob, Illinois.

The role of daylight and fresh air in this home is huge, and it's really the biggest impact that you can have on how you live inside of a home.

The daylighting is–it's not only free light, but it's the best lighting for your eyes.

We want to have fresh air in a home like this because we have a tight building envelope, so we have to find the best ways to bring in that fresh air.

In this case, we're talking about two of the people living in the home– a daughter and the mother–have allergies, and so we have to be sure that we balance all that out.

If you have a tight building envelope, it can hold in all kinds of bacteria and things if it's not filtrated properly, and you get enough fresh air balance with that.

The importance of the skylights are that they can open up and give what's called "the chimney effect". Heat inherently wants to rise.

We have a lot of vaulted areas in this house, so that air just stays up high and wants to be stagnant up there, but it affects your heating and cooling.

If we can open the skylights and some of the windows that are in the walls, that gives us this chimney effect where we're bringing in fresh air when need be, and we're pushing the warm air out through the skylights.

I think that having natural light in the home creates a happier environment for us as a family and to raise our two girls.

[bright music]