The first week of renovations in the new home has so far went pretty smoothly. The contractors I hired to do the roof are almost finished. I did catch them nailing down the new roof to rotten fascia boards, but got on them about it, and they started replacing them. There was less water damage to the trusses than I thought there would be; a couple might only need an inch or two cut off the end, not a big deal.
I got to do the fun stuff this weeked: asbestos abatement! Being that the home was built in 1964, during the years that asbestos was not known to destroy your lungs and therefore was used in a ton of building materials, I have a lot of it in my home, ie the popcorn ceiling, drywall mud, linoleum flooring, etc. Luckily most of it is totally fine and avoidable; the linoleum can be floored over, but the popcorn ceiling and drywall in the basement had to go, mainly because of water damage. So in order to do that half of the basement needed to be contained with poly sheeting. I spent Thursday and Friday doing that.
I enlisted the help of my friend, Pete, who has worked for our friend Walter, who runs a contracting company in Vancouver that specializes in asbestos abatement, who hooked us up with a care package full of Tyvex suits, positive pressure masks with filters, and gloves. We spent all of Saturday and half of Sunday wetting down the ceiling, scraping off the popcorn material and ripping down the drywall ceiling. This turned out to be a really good move, given the shoddy orientation of the drywall layout, and it's removal allowed water that had leaked in through the roof and into the ceiling to dry out and hopefully slow down any potential mold growth.
I got to do the fun stuff this weeked: asbestos abatement! Being that the home was built in 1964, during the years that asbestos was not known to destroy your lungs and therefore was used in a ton of building materials, I have a lot of it in my home, ie the popcorn ceiling, drywall mud, linoleum flooring, etc. Luckily most of it is totally fine and avoidable; the linoleum can be floored over, but the popcorn ceiling and drywall in the basement had to go, mainly because of water damage. So in order to do that half of the basement needed to be contained with poly sheeting. I spent Thursday and Friday doing that.
I enlisted the help of my friend, Pete, who has worked for our friend Walter, who runs a contracting company in Vancouver that specializes in asbestos abatement, who hooked us up with a care package full of Tyvex suits, positive pressure masks with filters, and gloves. We spent all of Saturday and half of Sunday wetting down the ceiling, scraping off the popcorn material and ripping down the drywall ceiling. This turned out to be a really good move, given the shoddy orientation of the drywall layout, and it's removal allowed water that had leaked in through the roof and into the ceiling to dry out and hopefully slow down any potential mold growth.
So that brings me one step closer to having the basement completely bare. Next weekend I will work on ripping out more walls to expose the foundation and search for any more cracks that will need repair, and I'll most likely tear out the back deck. My contractor will start demolishing the wall upstairs to reveal the damage that is likely to be there, but given how things haven't turned out to be quite as bad as I thought they would, maybe I'll get lucky and just be dealing with replacing studs. Fingers crossed. Overall it was a very productive weekend, and I owe Pete and Walter big time.
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