Happy Easter!

For Easter this year, we decided to celebrate the holiday by removing asbestos! Maybe not so traditional, but we were wearing “bunny suits” as evidenced by this post’s photo. A while back we had a sample tested and discovered that the cafeteria style (and color too!) linoleum floor tiles in the two bedrooms downstairs contained asbestos. After doing some Internet research and corresponding with LRAPA (Lane (County) Regional Air Pollution Authority) and a few local contractors who specialize in asbestos abatement, we determined that with relatively low risk and substantial savings, we could remove the offending tiles ourselves.

The next step was to acquire the appropriate gear. From a construction safety supply company, we bought two respirators or half-masks and the appropriate particulate filters. The filters are the brilliant pink disks on the front of our masks that kind of made us look like giant mosquitoes. The rest of the outfits we kind of winged. We bought painting hoods and jump suits so that if any of the asbestos fibers happened to become friable (get into the air) that we stood less of a chance of taking those back into our home on our clothes or in our hair. Next we donned some disposable gloves and armed ourselves with spray bottles to keep everything moist and less likely to make dust.

The whole project didn’t take very long. We soon got the hang of removing the tiles in one piece (quicker and safer) with a few well placed taps and a quick pry and boxed up all of the tiles and wrapped them in six mil. plastic. It really only took us two sessions of about two hours each to finish the job.

Sadly the glue or mastic used to install the tiles also contains asbestos. Without adding more chemicals to the mixture, we won’t be able to restore the original fir floors in either room, so instead we will be re-flooring them. The consensus for now is new hardwood.

We hope that you all had a wonderful Easter holiday. We sure did!