Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Asbestos and Maple Floors



You ever walk into a wonderful older house and see the UGLY ass floor tiles from like the 1940's? Ever wonder what's under there?

I didn't have to wonder.

When I moved into this house in 2007, Hubby had lived here for a few years already and was working on finishing up what the previous tenants/owners had done with tearing out walls and fixing it up. With all the dragging of materials, dropping tools and goodness knows what else, those lovely asbestos tiles had cracked and broken and started to come up at all random places all across the dining room.




I apologize for the crappy blurry photo, it was actually an accidental shot taken when my finger hit the trigger during a photoshoot ;)

I told Hubby a few months ago that one of these days I was going to get tired of seeing those tiles and the broken mis-matched floor and I was going to just tear up those nasty tiles.... two weeks later I went to pull my treadmill out and before I could set it up, I found myself having to sweep up yet MORE broken tiles before I could get to work.

I called over the oldest boy and said "Hey, want a job?" - that was in July.

This is a quick rundown of how that first day went:












And before anyone freaks out about the kids helping to remove them, Hubby is experienced in home renovations. He's been working in this field of work for nearly 20 years, and we did our research to find out the risks before hand and we found out that unless we were grinding it up, it was fairly low risk and doing ONE floor was highly unlikely to cause anyone any damage. Most of these tiles were breaking up into good sized pieces and we got many that came up in strips of 2 or more tiles!

I had a picture.... but I accidentally deleted it thinking it was on the computer... but here's one showing how important safety is! We couldn't find any safety glasses, so we went for stylish instead.



I'll post some more about this project as we go along... we started in July and here it is almost October and there's still work to be done!

5 comments:

Nan said...

working on ANY kind of asbestos is beyond dangerous....no masks??? Risk taken is beyond understanding....

Nan said...

ps. visit a Mesothelioma patient....My sister is battling for her life....

Nan said...

ps. visit a Mesothelioma patient....My sister is battling for her life....

Nan said...

working on ANY kind of asbestos is beyond dangerous....no masks??? Risk taken is beyond understanding....

Unknown said...

You guys are delusional when you believe there is such a thing as a "low risk" when it comes to asbestos.
Even worse is seeing you guys having your children sit amidst the broken asbestos tiles.

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