Saturday, June 2, 2012

Fun With Asbestos And Other Hazardous Materials

Sorry I took a bit of a blog break there. It was my intention to update this blog every week once we finally got the ball rolling, but we had some personal stuff go on and I didn't much feel like updating. BUT! I'm back now baby with lots to show you. First up is the exciting and dangerous world of asbestos abatement. As you will recall, our house is covered with these lovely asbestos shingles:


It was our fervent hope during this reno that we could remove those nasty shingles, find wonderful historic in tact re-usable siding, and totally insulate the walls of our house. So our contractor hired the wonderful company Bruce Environmental to come in and take care of it for us. One beautiful May morning they descended upon our house like rabid little wiener dogs and ripped all that nasty shingling right off. Sadly, we didn't get a photo of it in progress, but by that evening the original siding of our house saw the light of day for the first time in 60 years:



Doesn't it look like some creepy old Wild West house? Finally, we were able to solve some mysteries that had been nagging at us...like what was the original house color? (grey-white) And was the back of our house a porch that they filled in? Judging by this photo, it definitely looks that way (for those of you keeping track, that is our closet/master bath area):


As cool as it is though, the old siding was full of lead paint and just too crumbly to reuse, so we will have to replace it with some look-alike hardy plank. The good people of Bruce Environmental put on their hazmat suits and stripped our poor girl even more bare:



Note that there was no insulation between the siding and the lath on the inside of the house! In this naked state, we also discovered some more water damage had happened:


That's the window to our office. We think it wasn't sealed right, which caused water damage to that support beam. Ah, the joys of renovating.

After they got off all the siding, they wrapped the old gal in plastic ("She's Wrapped In Plastic!" Name that TV show reference.) to await bigger and better things.



I'll have more on that in my next blog post.






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