"There was an advertisement there for something that used the word 'fluffy'. It might've been golden, fluffy crumpets or some such thing," he said.

"I had to walk out. I just left the shopping there and walked out, in tears."

Mr Weller is a former Mr Fluffy homeowner. He and his wife were forced from their Charnwood home of 13 years by the loose-fill asbestos insulation crisis that affected 1023 Canberra homes.

Mr Fluffy's impact was felt right across the ACT and beyond, but it hit particularly hard in the streets developed in the late 1960s and the 1970s.

Twelve Canberra streets contained six or more Mr Fluffy houses and have since been transformed.

Boot Place in Charnwood didn't even have that many homes, but three of the five, including Mr Weller's, were contaminated with potentially deadly loose-fill asbestos fibres.

When he meets the Sunday Canberra Times outside his former residence, a new home stands in its place. The other side of the road is empty, with the two Mr Fluffy homes that stood there having been bulldozed.

It is just the second time Mr Weller, who now lives in Murrumbateman, has been back to Boot Place since moving out.

"Driving here, I could fell the stress rising," he said.

"Right now, I'm shaking. That's what it's doing to me, just coming back here and seeing it and seeing the empty places over there, seeing some of the neighbours.

"It's nice to see some old faces, but it's a stressful time for me."

Mr Weller recalled when he and the neighbours from the other two Mr Fluffy houses in the street discovered they were all affected by the crisis.

"Certainly, it was a help for us, the fact that we had other people in the street that were going through the same sort of shit that we were dealing with," he said.

"We could sort of cry on each other's shoulders occasionally, or go round and have a drink or whatever it might be.

"[But they were] ordinary times."

The only other time Mr Weller has returned to Boot Place since moving out was to watch the demolition of his former home.

"We came back for that, stood under the umbrella because it was raining, cracked open a bottle of bubbles, toasted the house and told them to start the machinery," he said.

Mr Weller likened the experience to a death in the family, similar to viewing a body in a coffin or watching a burial.

"Watching it happen, [I was] numb. I didn't really have any feelings left," he said.

"We'd been through two years of misery and heartache, dealing with all of it, as well as some good times in getting the new house built and sorted.

"But here, two years of misery and heartache. [I was] just numb, watching it go down."

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While he felt numb during the demolition, the impact of Mr Fluffy lives on in the everyday experiences of people like Mr Weller and the other homeowners.

That's why he had to leave the supermarket when he spotted the word "fluffy", and why every cough comes with a pang of fear.

"We invited friends and family through the house," Mr Weller said.

"We've exposed them to asbestos. We've exposed ourselves to asbestos. Every single time we cough, that thought goes through your head: is this going to be the start of asbestosis? Mesothelioma? Cancer?

"We've got a life sentence."

Mr Weller believes the homeowners were never properly compensated for what they lost.

He and his wife spent "tens of thousands of dollars" renovating the Charnwood house and improving the yard, but their efforts were not reflected in the market value approximation given as part of the ACT government's buyback and demolition scheme.

He said market value was not everything, and there had been no compensation for the emotional distress and the lost opportunity to use and enjoy the improvements made to his home.

Still today, he wonders why the sorry saga was able to unfold in the first place, following revelations the Commonwealth government failed to act on a 1968 warning that Dirk Jansen should be stopped from installing loose-fill asbestos insulation because of the health risks involved.

A mass clean-up operation headed by the Commonwealth in the late 1980s and early 1990s resulted in asbestos being removed from the ceilings of some homes, but remaining in the floors and walls.

"As a result of two pretty ordinary government decisions, we got left holding the baby," Mr Weller said.

"It'd be nice to know why governments made those decisions. A board of inquiry may go partway to addressing that."

Another former Mr Fluffy homeowner, Lin Thorncraft, also advocated for a board of inquiry, which is the territory equivalent of a royal commission.

She is another who lived in a street hit particularly hard by the asbestos crisis.

Six homes on Bainton Crescent in Melba were declared Mr Fluffy houses, including Mrs Thorncraft's.

The street sweeps around Mount Rogers and Mrs Thorncraft said she and her husband David weren't ready to give up the views and neighbours they had in Bainton Crescent.

But they felt they had no choice but to go when told their house would need to be demolished.

Their former block is now an empty lot.

"With what the government gave us [through the buyback and demolition scheme], we couldn't find anything that would suit us in Canberra and that had the views and value we had in Bainton Crescent, without going into huge debt," Mrs Thorncraft said.

"We couldn't afford to go onto a higher mortgage. My husband and I were in our 60s. At our ages, we couldn't do it."

The Thorncrafts moved to Tura Beach, on the NSW far south coast, four years ago.

That meant they were not entitled to the stamp duty concessions given to Mr Fluffy homeowners who sold their properties to the ACT government and then bought another dwelling in the territory.

Mrs Thorncraft believed this was unfair, especially because she would have stayed in Canberra if it had have been affordable.

"That's totally wrong. It's another lot of money you've got to fork out," she said.

"I know it was our choice to move, to a degree, but we had to look at what we could afford without going into huge debt, with a huge mortgage.

"We weren't ready to downsize or do any of that. We just wanted to replace what we had, and we just couldn't afford to do it in Canberra.

"We just had to leave everything we knew behind."

Four years after leaving Canberra, Mrs Thorncraft said the scars remained, but the number of bad days were increasingly fewer.

But when she and David visit their children in Canberra, old memories sometimes return.

On occasions, they have been able to go past the site where their former home stood. Other times, it's all too much.

"It's hard because our kids are up there and we're down here [in Tura Beach]," she said.

"If it's your own decision to go, it's easier because you've made that decision yourself, but when it's been forced onto you ... we had no choice in the end."

Chief Minister Andrew Barr all but abandoned the idea of a Mr Fluffy board of inquiry in 2016, saying he had failed to win the support of the Commonwealth and NSW governments, and wouldn't do it without them.

The minister responsible for the Asbestos Response Taskforce, Rachel Stephen-Smith, did not address the possibility of a board of inquiry in a statement to the Sunday Canberra Times.

She said the ACT government's continued focus was on completing its loose-fill asbestos eradication scheme, which includes buying back and demolishing Mr Fluffy properties.

"The scheme requires a significant amount of ACT government resources and constitutes around one-third of territory government debt," Ms Stephen-Smith said.

"Government programs of the size and scope of this scheme will always be evaluated.

"This evaluation will include a review of the costs, timing and communication between ACT government and stakeholders. This evaluation will take place after the program concludes."