It came as a shock to the couple, whose two children had grown up in the house, and it would be only the start of years of heartache and stress.

The letter was sent in February 2014 to 1049 addresses, where properties were thought to have been cleared of Mr Fluffy asbestos insulation between 1988 and 1993. New tests had found fibres remained.

Commonwealth government authorities raised concerns as early as 1968 but nothing stopped Dirk Jansen pumping loose-fill asbestos into roofs in the 1960s and 1970s, a brilliant insulator if it was not also a silent killer.

Now, the Hansens regret ever moving into the home. Mrs Hansen worries about how much asbestos her children were exposed to.

What was supposed to be a simple laundry renovation a decade ago exposed asbestos fibres in the wall cavities. Mrs Hansen had them cleaned out after a plumber raised the alarm but that period of time when the laundry did not have a door and her children's rooms were nearby haunts her.

"I try not to think about it, but me being from the health profession and certainly having nursed people with mesothelioma, yeah, absolutely I do think about that and I do think about and worry about our kids' future," she says.

"It can be 30 years before it appears in people, which would put our children in their 30s. Potentially, when they're living and enjoying their lives and having their own families, they may well be diagnosed with this incurable disease."

For the Hansens, there was never any question of whether they would return home when they found out their house would have to be demolished. But they went it alone, demolishing and rebuilding without joining the ACT government's voluntary buy-back scheme. "I pragmatically just tried to do the maths and work out how much a house was to rebuild, because mentally I wasn't going. Whether it was the government scheme or not the government scheme, we weren't leaving," Mr Hansen says.

While about 600 owners of the more than 1000 affected houses wanted to return home, only 47 sites have been sold back to their original owners.

Others, like Christina and Chris Pilkington, did join the scheme, forced to tackle rising values and buying back their block for more than they were paid, without somewhere to live.

The family had worked hard to buy a house in Ainslie. They scrimped and saved to be able to afford somewhere their kids could walk to school from in a tight-knit neighbourhood community.

Their cream brick, three-bedroom house on Chisholm Street seemed perfect. "We moved in and it was great for the first eight months ... and suddenly it feels like you're living in a death trap," Mrs Pilkington says.

"I yelled at my son for dancing to the Wiggles because it was shaking the house and I said, 'You're releasing fibres!'"

The experience of waiting, the valuation process and uncertainty about when the family would even begin to be able to rebuild left Mrs Pilkington with far less trust in the government.

"We are grateful to the government but we are grateful in the same way you're grateful to a hostage taker who doesn't shoot you," she says. "They had all the power and yet they didn't shoot us, but they definitely didn't show compassion."

The Pilkingtons bought the house for $711,000 in 2013, were paid $735,000 in October 2014 under the buy-back scheme and bought the land from the government for $725,000 in 2016, leaving only $10,000 from what they were first paid to rebuild.

The family's builder was happy to cut things off the off-the-plan house plan they chose for the block, saving $500 here and there. For Mrs Pilkington, every cent needed to count.

Mr Hansen says the language around the ACT government's $1 billion loan turned the community against the Mr Fluffy owners, people caught up in a silent crisis at the scale of a natural disaster.

"I had the sense that if the Australian people - the sense of fair go and what's right - knew what was happening to us was happening, then they would call bullshit, and say, 'This is not right'.

"But Canberra being a smaller issue as it is, it never got that level of public consciousness, if you like," he says. Now the couple has a mortgage which the pair will never pay off. They say they value being part of their community more than the money.

Both the Pilkingtons and the Hansens would like to see a board of inquiry, a process that they say could go some of the way to providing closure to the affected families.

"I'd like to see the Canberra government at least held accountable for allowing this stuff to be instilled in the homes even though it was advised ... not for it to happen. And just acknowledge the impact it's had on all the Fluffy community, for us and all the other people who've been displaced from their homes and communities," Mrs Hansen says.

Mr Hansen says he will not get back those evenings he should have spent helping his son with homework rather than writing angry emails.

Mrs Pilkington says she will always have to live with the fact she was an absent mother during some of the most formative years of her children's lives in the most uncertain stages of the crisis.

She says she sees why people who did not own Mr Fluffy homes might think the outcome was fine.

"I wouldn't wish this on [Chief Minister] Andrew Barr himself because it is a terrible experience. But I understand that on the surface it might not seem that bad. You know, you get some money for your house, you move on, you should just be able to go and buy another house and let go," she says.

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Mrs Hansen says the crisis had brought her and her husband closer together. "We sort of took in turns looking after each other, I think. Our good friends as well and our neighbours, that's what got us through, really," she says.

Mrs Pilkington made sure to keep one, small reminder of her family's old Ainslie house. The demolition team left the old mail box in the back shed which has been proudly re-installed.

"I'm very proud of my mailbox, it's like my connection to the old house. My mother was like, 'Your mailbox is awful, let's get a new mailbox.' And I went, 'No, I love this is mailbox'," Mrs Pilkington says.

It did not matter it was a little bit shabby, it meant the Pilkingtons had made it - finally - back home.