But it’s not the excitement she remembers as she signed the contracts on the home in Fraser, right near where she grew up. It’s one of the last documents their solicitor slid across the desk to be signed that stands out.

“He said, ‘Here's the certificate of clearance for asbestos, and the house is fine, there's no problem, there's no asbestos, keep signing’. I remember it so clearly,” she says.

Twenty years later, almost to the day, they received a letter informing them their house was contaminated by Mr Fluffy, and would have to be demolished.

Until then, they had never even heard of Mr Fluffy - the company that blew fibrous, loose-fill asbestos into hundreds of Canberra homes in the 1960s and '70s.

The owner of the company, Dirk Jansen, was under investigation as early as 1968, but despite reports that community exposure to asbestos could be “undesirable”, he kept working until 1978, and died in 2001.

Meanwhile, there was growing public concern about the hazards of asbestos in general, and a 1988 Commonwealth audit identified most of the homes that contained the asbestos. The new ACT government ran a clean-up program between 1989 and 1993, and thought it had fixed the problem. But remnants of Mr Fluffy’s product were later detected in several of these homes.

In 2014, in response to community action, the ACT government negotiated a demolition scheme, involving a $1 billion loan to fund the purchase of all Mr Fluffy houses - 1022 in all - and their subsequent demolition. The proceeds of the sales of these blocks would go towards repaying the Commonwealth loan.

But Hunt and her husband knew nothing about the scheme until they received their letter. In fact, just two months earlier, they had received their certificate of occupancy approving the extensive renovations they had just completed on the home.

“So one part of the government was saying, ‘Yes, your house is fine to live in, great new extension’, and the other was saying, ‘By the way, we're now demolishing your house’,” Hunt says.

The couple waited until the last minute before deciding to let the ACT government buy their house. They tried in vain to get permission to stay put and demolish the house themselves, but were refused point blank. Meanwhile, their house was contaminated and worthless, and property prices around them were ballooning upwards.

Two years later, they moved into a house a few streets away. They’ve spent considerable time and money renovating it and rehabilitating the large garden. They’ve added a deck which has a spectacular view across north Canberra. But while they’re in a far better place than many other Fluffy affected families, Hunt says it’s impossible to feel settled.

“We've moved house, but we haven't moved on,” she says.

“And we’re not going to move on. A lot of my friends and my family have been very supportive, but I know they're getting to the point where they're saying, ‘Just move on’.

“I don't think anybody who's been involved in this will really ever move on.”

One of the main issues that hang over her and many of the hundreds of other Fluffy-affected families is the looming health risks of prolonged exposure to the deadly asbestos.

“We lived in places with asbestos, and we renovated,” she says.

“That's always going to be there, we cannot move on from that. The guilt, the amount of tradespeople that we had coming and doing those renovations - it just makes me sick thinking of those people.”

But another obstacle is the government’s lack of commitment to a board of inquiry, or any kind of hearing, even after the demolition scheme is due to end on June 30, 2020.

“I can't start healing until I've been heard,” Hunt says.

Felicity Prideaux, another Fluffy victim, agrees. Her Hackett home was one of 29 in the inner-north suburb affected.

“There are still so many unanswered questions,” she says.

She and her husband Rob were also in the midst of significant renovations of their home when they received their letter 2014. They had bought the house in 2002 on the understanding, she says, that it had been cleared of all asbestos.

By then empty-nesters, she and her husband had planned to renovate their home, sell it and move to Tasmania. But that dream couldn’t be further away from their new reality. They have moved to a new home in Murrumbateman in NSW - and therefore lost the opportunity to recoup the stamp duty they lost on their Hackett home - and Rob has health problems.

“To the best that we can, we’re moving forward, but it weighs very heavily on my husband,” she says.

“He lost his small business, because he worked from home.”

She knew of many families who had lost businesses, with “absolutely nothing” by way of compensation.

In fact, beyond the opportunity to sell their houses to the government - at 2014 prices - and minor relocation costs, none of the families have received anything to make up for their loss.

Meanwhile, the ACT government has made $500 million off public sales of the Fluffy houses it has sold, with only 66 remaining. That money goes towards repaying the territory's $1 billion loan from the Commonwealth for clean up scheme.

Hunt says one of the biggest frustrations has been the perceived community feeling that Fluffy owners should just accept their lot and get on with their lives, with little to show for all that they've lost.

“There wasn't a single Mr Fluffy family that didn't come out of this worse off, financially, emotionally, physically. Everyone is behind the eight-ball,” she says.

Worst of all, she and Prideaux say, is the fact that although hundreds of families were forced out of their homes, there has been no community support for anyone in their situation. Put bluntly, leaving an asbestos-riddled house is not the same as losing your house in a bushfire.

“In fact, there's little understanding because the government has tried to make us out to be the bad people,” Prideaux says.

Many victims have suffered marriage break-ups and stress-related illnesses as a result of the crisis, over and above the significant financial losses. And many are worried about their long-term health.

“It's probably never going to be over for another 50-odd years, until we know that kids that were raised in these houses don't have mesothelioma, or until we have a board of inquiry into what happened,” Prideaux says.

“The purpose of that is to determine how we can move forward and manage this sort of scenario better in the future. Because there will be another substance that will be toxic, there will be another issue. Let's learn from it and let's move forward.”

Hunt says even a simple apology would go a long way at this stage.

“I want someone to say sorry,” she says.

“I want someone to say 'We're sorry it ever happened, we're sorry we let you buy a house that was contaminated, we're sorry we let you renovate continuously a house that was contaminated and that you exposed yourself and friends and family and tradespeople to it, and I'm sorry that we ripped you off royally and made you lose your life savings'.

“I think one of the hardest things is that we have completely and utterly lost our trust in all politicians and a great majority of public servants.”

Many families haven't moved at all, even physically, and remain in limbo while the deadline of June 30, 2020, ticks closer. One such homeowner, who prefers to remain anonymous, says his family simply can't afford to move from their Fluffy-contaminated house. The price the government would pay for his house - which had been substantially renovated to allow his grown children to stay living there - would only just cover the substantial amount still owing on the mortgage. Without the house, he would have very little left.

He says the fear of asbestos-related illness isn't their main priority. "We're all going die at some time anyway," he says.

Prideaux acknowledges that not all affected families are calling for an inquiry, and many have moved on. Several households, for example, have used the Fluffy saga as an opportunity to downsize, or move away from Canberra altogether, often in accordance with their original plans.

“Thank God that some people got some good stuff out of this - that's really important,” Prideaux says.

“Not everybody has a tale that's sad. However a lot of people have lost huge amounts of money, hundreds of thousands, and they have little kids, and they've just had to say, ‘We've got to suck this up and get on with our lives and make sure the children have the least disruption possible’, because they don't want this hanging over their kids' heads. And that's what they've done - they've said, 'We're not happy but we've got to move on'. And that's what you have to do.

"Not everybody is in a position to keep the argument going, and keep fighting for things that really need to be made right.

“But ignoring what's basically an injustice is not something that's right either."