Walls come down

Asbestos removal day! Well, the start of the long process of asbestos removal. It's exciting to be getting started with this after learning that our house is infested with the stuff. We purchased the house knowing that the back study area had it in the walls and ceiling, but now we know it's also in the kitchen, bathroom, spare bedroom, and both front sunrooms.

We've engaged a company who specialize in this kind of work to come and take the fibro away. We're allowed to do small amounts of asbestos removal ourselves and it would have worked out cheaper, but after reading about the process and the stress we've already had over these walls we decided to leave it to the pro's. For this stage of the work we're removing three walls, and having it all disposed of including the two pantry cupboards which are attached to the wall, and also the small kitchen cabinet in between them. The white cupboards on the other wall are just screwed on and will be taken under the house and recycled as storage (probably for Mr Fox's precious and fast growing collection of super masculine tools). This is costing us about $1500 which sounds like a lot for three sheets of fibro, but it will be worth it to not worry about appropriate handing and the potential health impacts if we were to bugger it up.

So Mr Fox and I met with the asbestos removal guys in the morning and left while they unrolled acres of black plastic sheeting in the kitchen feeling glad it wasn't us, and mighty excited (and even more nervous) to see what we'd find when we got home.

Kitchen: Before and After!

Kitchen Before: Two non-matching pantry cupboard things to dump.
Fibro wall behind to be ripped off.



Kitchen After: Original, unpainted vj boards!
Fridge against the wall instead of floating in the middle
of the room. Happy times for the fridge.

 

Kitchen After: Empty wall where white cabinets were.

Bedroom Before and After!

Spare Bedroom: This is how much wallpaper steaming
happened before we got nervous about
what was underneath.

Bedroom After: Scary electrical wire hanging.
Hole that goes all the way through to the kitchen.
Not one, but two shades of ancient green paint.

So, walls are out. We have less asbestos in the house. We also have three very ugly walls. We're happy with how it all went, and relieved to find normal vj walls underneath ready for us to work with. There are a couple of issues: there's a hole that goes all the way through from the kitchen to the bedroom like a creepy little peep hole, and also a horizontal slice into the wall on the kitchen side. The hole can be patched while we putty up the thousand or so screw holes in the bedroom wall, but the cut will be harder to disguise. We're going to (attempt) to put in a new vj wall on the kitchen side just to make it easier, and then paint both rooms to match the areas we've already done. The other thing will be getting skirting boards and picture rails to match what's left in the rooms, but that is a challenge for another day. I was hoping to put up pictures of the completed rooms in this post, but it's going to take weeeeks of work to finish.

The kitchen will look like a disaster area for a few months yet while those yellow benches still exist, but I'm so excited about finishing the second bedroom and actually being able to have people stay over! It's basically been a dumping ground since we moved in (not the only one!) and I just want to make it nice, probably still a dumping ground, but a less obvious one.

So that's where we're up to. This weekend we're getting the sandpaper out again and bulk buying the putty - and coffee!