Construction

What it’s like to have asbestos abatement

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I imagine that most of you have never had an asbestos abatement sign posted in your dining room. This was the first full week of the construction at my house. As I am typing this, one of our crew is upstairs with a shop-vac getting rid of the rest of the 80 year old insulation in the attic. I don’t think he was looking forward to today; it was messy.

We started the week with the asbestos crew setting up. It took an entire day for them to seal the upstairs with plastic and wide yellow tape on every surface. Then they had to construct a 3-part decontamination area at the bottom of the stairs. That’s what you can see in the photo up at the top of the post. They explained to me that they had to have three separate chambers, including a shower, right there in my dining room. On top of the middle section you can see a portable water heater and we turned on our outside faucet for them so they could run a garden hose in through the window. We had all of that set up over night, so we ate dinner at my desk. Stanley was very suspicious of this new construction in his space. We pulled out every rug in the house to put over the plastic on the floor because it was slippery and we didn’t want dog toe nails to compromise the area.

Once they got all the set up done, it really only took an hour to take out the asbestos, which was all in the floor tile. I understand that the tiles get double wrapped in plastic and then they can be disposed of. So we are no longer the proud owners of any asbestos. Yay!

The way our house is arranged, there is just one door that connects the left and right side. Our offices are one on either side of that doorway, so Stanley and my husband were kind of trapped on one side and I was stuck on the other. We made jokes about having to boost the 90lb labrador out the guestroom window to go potty, but happily we didn’t have to resort to that.

While all of that was going on inside, there was also a big project outside. Since the staircase to upstairs is narrow with a sharp corner at the top, and they need to haul huge sheets of plywood and 2x4s up there, they spent the day building an outside staircase to our second floor. So they will have an easier way to move all of the materials without everything needing to go through my living room. I’m really happy about that.

Once the asbestos was gone, demolition started! It looks so different already! We are keeping a little bit of that pine panelling in place around the stairs, but it was really too old and brittle to salvage most of it. Those yucky looking dirt piles are the disintegrated paper insulation. That’s what he has been working on most of the day today and I told him that I was really glad that was *his* job and not mine. There’s no insulation at all up there now and it’s COLD. Fortunately they will have that fixed in just a couple of weeks.

The Construction Project: Before we start

beckarahn2023-09-13T20:22:57-05:00Construction, Everything Else|2 Comments

A year ago in September, I was teaching a Zoom class and my husband heard a “whump” from the other room. He thought the dog had gotten into something upstairs, but when he went to investigate he found that a large section of our ceiling had fallen down. Our house was built in 1927 and is a beautiful Craftsman style bungalow, but the upstairs hadn’t been updated at all. So that nearly 100 year old fiber ceiling tile just gave up.

The downstairs is beautiful with all of the original oak woodwork and maple floors. Ours is very similar to this one with a little larger footprint and only a “half” story on the top level so the ceiling is only full height in some parts. Our upstairs is one big open room and was our bedroom and my husband’s work-at-home office during the pandemic. When we bought the house 20+ years ago, the people we bought it from (Harold and Olive) were in their 90s and were only the second people to own the house. They had “finished” the upstairs into what we figure must have been a family room with knotty pine paneling covering every wall and tons of closets and storage nooks. It was functional but certainly not pretty. We lived with it because (as any of you know who have lived in an old house), there was always something else more in desperate need of being fixed.

At first we stared at the piles of disintegrating ceiling tiles and dusty paper insulation and laughed. Because what else can you do? And then we tried to figure out how to fix it. We knew we couldn’t really do it ourselves, even though we are pretty experienced fixer-uppers. It’s an entire floor of the house. That’s more than a weekend project.

So we talked to friends and found a fantastic contractor. It took months to work into his schedule and talk about what we wanted to do. Then he was put on medical leave. So we had to get another contractor (also awesome) and work into his schedule. We pulled in my dad, who to our great good fortune is a retired architect with a love of old houses and creative problem solving.

Our “fix the ceiling and the insulation” project turned into a “what would happen if we cut open the roof and added a new dormer so we could have a second bathroom?” project. We had every intention of fixing up this space when we moved in so we had some money saved up (thank goodness) so that let us dream a little bigger than just fix it and we get to make it a new cool space.

Things I learned so far which I didn’t know:

You have to have a certain ratio of square footage of space to windows to provide light and ventilation to meet building code. We had not even close to enough. Because it’s one big room it has to have a lot of windows. Windows take 8 months to get right now. We ordered our windows in May and we are keeping our fingers crossed we will have them by the time we need them.
In 1927, walls of houses were insulated with newspapers sewn into booklets. We spent a lot of time crawling into the knee walls and rafters getting measurements so we could draw up plans and we pulled out fragments of December 1927 newspapers written in Norwegian (?).

You don’t want to have to figure out where to store the contents of an entire floor of your house for a year and a half. I just have one word for you about the state of my basement: yikes. Our basement is unfinished, so usually I have a “wet” studio for painting and a photo studio set up down there and it’s our space for working on projects like fixing computers or unpacking craft shows so things don’t have to be all over the dining room table. Next week I am rearranging, organizing and taking as many things as I can to goodwill to try and clear some space for the electrician and plumber to work. I can’t even tell you how nice it’s going to be to have the basement and upstairs usable again.

Asbestos abatement for those lovely floor tiles starts next week. Wish us luck!