Asbestos 101

Yes, it has been about three months since my last post. And yes, we are still working on our house. While I will spare you all the boring details about what all we have fixed, updated, installed, knocked out and enclosed, I am going to share my wealth of knowledge that I have gained on the subject of Asbestos.

Our house was built in 1975. After our inspection and closing on our new/old house, John and I started on the mile long list of renovations. From the looks on the inside, the house hadn’t seen any updates since it was originally built. While I am sure some people like the dark brown paneling and popcorn ceilings of the 70’s, it doesn’t really suit my fancy. We figured we would start from the top down, so scraping the ceilings was at the top of our list. John researched how to do it (because paying for labor was not in the budget). First thing that had to be done was to scrape a sample of the popcorn ceiling and send it to a lab to be tested for asbestos. Two days later we got the call that it was “hot.” In layman’s terms… we had asbestos in the ceiling in over half the house- 5% to be exact, which we were told is a medium to high amount for a residence.

What do you do about that? Well, you call your friend that is an asbestos expert. Everyone has one right? But seriously, I do. Nate H. came to our rescue- and while I can’t name my first born child after him, we definitely owe him some warmed up cow on a plate. Nate told us how to safely remove it from the ceilings- seal off the doorways and vents, cover everything in plastic, open all windows and doors to the outside, and most importantly wet the popcorn and scrape it off and keep it wet. The objective is to keep the dust from it from stirring up into the air. So that is exactly what John did while wearing his coveralls and respirator (a kind of homemade hazmat suit).

After a couple of weeks of ridding our house of the asbestos, we called Nate to come in and test our air to make sure that we got every bit of it out, also to make sure that what we had been breathing the past couple of weeks wasn’t going to give us cancer. Now, just to put into perspective our test results, schools have the strictest standards and are allowed a score of 70 per so many units of air. So as long as we scored a 70 or lower, we were okay to move in. Our score- 437.

Six times higher than what they allow in schools! I was never in more need of a padded room than when I heard that news. I thought I was going to have a mental/emotional/physical breakdown (and basically did on every level to a certain extent).

The explanation- We speculate that the source was not the ceilings (as we removed it the exact way we were supposed to) but a wall in our master bedroom that we knocked down. We assume that asbestos was in the joint compound in the wall, and since we didn’t know to test the wall, the dust from it got in the air and spread throughout the house.

To make a long story a little bit shorter, John, his parents, and I spent several days cleaning the house, switching filters, dusting, vacuuming, and mopping in hopes to collect all the asbestos dust that settled. Nate also brought over an air filtration system that filtered the air in the house which we ran non-stop for about a week. After days of cleaning and what I know was a little divine intervention, Nate came to test a second time and we got a score of zero on our results. We got EVERY BIT of it out!

As for our health… I don’t think we have asbestos (or Mesothelioma, the cancer you get from asbestos), because we only had limited exposure to it. Evidently those people who do get or have it, are those people who worked in the factories or in construction that were around it all day everyday for many years. It takes about 30 yrs for it to show up, so I’ll let you know in 2038.