Work on the house!
21 Jul 2020 03:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneThe carpenter's apprentices are here scoping out what they're gonna have to do to finish in our downstairs. The plumbers and electricians are the ones who are mostly not done, but there's a ceiling and some trim boards and then there's some new wallboards in the kitchen because we gotta hang some new cabinets and tiles up on them.
I'm so happy to see them again! The extremely diligent and fast one who did our entire upstairs bath so fast that the contractor barely had time to talk to him before he was done and the contractor's teenaged son who has grown out a butter-yellow man bun like baby Thor and is smoking and squinting into the sun. They're both such little babies and they're so businesslike. Maybe I should ply them with baked goods - although really I have resisted baking in this tiny postage-stamp kitchen because it's so cramped.
The kitchen wall that needs to be fixed has some original sheathing boards, the giant rough-hewn ones that are all 16"+ wide with big gaps between and bits of bark on, and then it's got places where someone slapped up some plywood under tiles (plywood is terrible under tiles, it just absorbs the water out of the mortar and they loosen). So the wall has a bunch of surfaces and a bunch of different levels and then at the bottom it's got a brick bumpout forming part of the original woodstove, which then had a 70s era hideous woodstove hooked up right in front of it.
I started to try to pry the tiles off the wall myself earlier in the summer but then I read, quite suddenly, that asbestos can be found not only in vinyl and linoleum flooring and insulation and caulking and adhesive, but even in mortar and tiles from the middle of the century... of course I'd already broken some so there's some dust in the room. We closed up the room while deciding what to do about it, but there isn't that much of the tile stuff around. Because the floor is likely contaminated too, Wax was thinking maybe she'd just hire a specialist to remove all the floor and all the tiles without bothering to test them, but the carpenters are unexpectedly ready and the contractor told her his dudes will take care of it. They said they can remove the bricks (which won't have any asbestos in them and will be mortared with lime) and simply put new gypsumboard over the tiles when leveling out the wall - which makes sense because the tiles are only a couple of millimeters thick (Now why didn't I think of that?). I'm a little leery about them working with the stuff, but I suppose that that's kinda what contractors do around here - look at the probable amount of risk and just work around things. So I guess if the dust is dampened down there shouldn't be much inhalation risk. The contractor and his apprentices weren't telling us NOT to hire an asbestos removal guy - they were perfectly willing to let us make the call - it was just clear that what they'd normally do was this, so we said okay.
I'm so happy to see them again! The extremely diligent and fast one who did our entire upstairs bath so fast that the contractor barely had time to talk to him before he was done and the contractor's teenaged son who has grown out a butter-yellow man bun like baby Thor and is smoking and squinting into the sun. They're both such little babies and they're so businesslike. Maybe I should ply them with baked goods - although really I have resisted baking in this tiny postage-stamp kitchen because it's so cramped.
The kitchen wall that needs to be fixed has some original sheathing boards, the giant rough-hewn ones that are all 16"+ wide with big gaps between and bits of bark on, and then it's got places where someone slapped up some plywood under tiles (plywood is terrible under tiles, it just absorbs the water out of the mortar and they loosen). So the wall has a bunch of surfaces and a bunch of different levels and then at the bottom it's got a brick bumpout forming part of the original woodstove, which then had a 70s era hideous woodstove hooked up right in front of it.
I started to try to pry the tiles off the wall myself earlier in the summer but then I read, quite suddenly, that asbestos can be found not only in vinyl and linoleum flooring and insulation and caulking and adhesive, but even in mortar and tiles from the middle of the century... of course I'd already broken some so there's some dust in the room. We closed up the room while deciding what to do about it, but there isn't that much of the tile stuff around. Because the floor is likely contaminated too, Wax was thinking maybe she'd just hire a specialist to remove all the floor and all the tiles without bothering to test them, but the carpenters are unexpectedly ready and the contractor told her his dudes will take care of it. They said they can remove the bricks (which won't have any asbestos in them and will be mortared with lime) and simply put new gypsumboard over the tiles when leveling out the wall - which makes sense because the tiles are only a couple of millimeters thick (Now why didn't I think of that?). I'm a little leery about them working with the stuff, but I suppose that that's kinda what contractors do around here - look at the probable amount of risk and just work around things. So I guess if the dust is dampened down there shouldn't be much inhalation risk. The contractor and his apprentices weren't telling us NOT to hire an asbestos removal guy - they were perfectly willing to let us make the call - it was just clear that what they'd normally do was this, so we said okay.
(no subject)
Date: 21 Jul 2020 01:55 pm (UTC)So happy there is progress for you.