Pre-demolition Environmental Testing
For the past month we’ve been waiting on testing and a quote for mitigation of asbestos. I thought this would all happen a lot quicker, but it’s been taking a lot longer than what I was hoping.
Balancing Family and Home Projects
It started about a month ago (March 1) when we first had the house originally tested for asbestos. It was a crazy morning as we were heading down to CA to take our 2 month old to meet some extended family. We were leaving our two older kids with Grammy for the weekend, but our two-year old woke up with some breathing issues.
He has had issues in the past, when he gets an upper respiratory infections and he has an inhaler for this. Anyways, we decided to take him into the doctor to get checked and to get a breathing treatment. Earlier in the week I had talked to a contractor about getting the house tested for asbestos, and the company he works with comes from the coast and happened to be in town that day.
So, here we are, trying to get ready to leave for a weekend trip; leaving two kids – one with some breathing issues – then getting a call from the contractor saying that they wanted to get samples from the house to test for asbestos and lead paint and needing to be at the airport by noon!
For the most part, planning the demolition and new build has been a lot of “hurry up and wait”. Everyone needs something right now, but then we wait around to hear from the next person. Managing a family, with three children, under the age of four gives us little time to do other things and sometimes can make life feel a little crazy. After all that rushing around, they were able to get the samples they needed; and we crossed our fingers waiting for the results.
Round 1 – Asbestos Test Results
About a week later we got the results and it showed that there was asbestos in the floor of the kitchen, the roof and an equivocal amount in the walls. A little disappointing as we now had to budget for the removal of the asbestos, but it could have been much worse if it there was popcorn ceiling throughout the house or asbestos in other areas.
We then had to wait for bid on mitigation of the asbestos as the mitigation company worked with the local air quality agency to see what they would allow for removal. We got the bid back and it was much more than we were expecting. Part of the reasoning for this was that it was on the roof; and as it is a condemned home and parts of the roof are unsafe to stand on. In order to get the asbestos off the roof they would have to use a special procedure (essentially they were looking at trying to suspend someone from a crane or something, so that they could get the stuff off the roof without standing on the roof due to the unsafe conditions).
I talked this over with our contractor and we decided to get a second quote. The second company looked at the results from the first testing and said that the amount in the walls was equivocal, (there was gypsum in the wall and the way they mined gypsum would sometimes get contaminated by asbestos; so the question was whether the asbestos was from contamination or actual asbestos) and that we could retest it, using a more specific test. If it came back below the threshold of what needs to be removed, we wouldn’t have to get it removed from the walls.
Round 2 – Asbestos Test Results
We received the results from the second test about a week ago, around the beginning of April and the amount of asbestos in the walls is below the threshold – good news! That means we could save a lot by not needing to get the dry wall mitigated. Also, the second company got the ok from the local air quality agency to allow them to remove the roof and place it on the ground and do the mitigation from there, taking out the need for the extra process of suspending someone over the roof.
The only problem was that the second bid for mitigation of the asbestos on the roof and floor was not much better than the first bid; so we decided to go back to the first company and get a new bid, with the new results.
We were supposed to have results by last Friday, but I still have not heard from our contractor on this, so hopefully we will hear something soon.
Oh Brother! – We have Lead Paint 🙁
Going into this process everyone kept talking about the asbestos and not really mentioning the lead paint. I knew that this could be a concern as well, but didn’t think it was going to be as big of a problem. Well, we tested for lead paint and it came back three times the limit on the walls. Our contractor has been talking about the extra process for getting rid of the lead paint, so I started to look into what was required for the lead paint.
Interestingly enough, I found out that for complete demolition in Oregon, there are no rules. The rules for lead paint abatement are for contractors who are renovating, repairing or painting. If you are the home owner and are doing the work yourself the rules do not apply to you. That does not mean you shouldn’t take precautions when dealing with lead paint, as there are still health concerns, but it does mean that there are not specific rules governing you.
The one caveat to this is the jurisdiction where the work is happening, if the work is being done in Portland there might be other rules that apply. The City of Eugene has a demolition best practices guide and from my understanding there are no special requirements for complete demolition, but “best practice” is to try and eliminate as much dust as possible. Also, not all landfills accept debris with lead paint; so if there is lead paint, you may have to haul it to a special landfill that is lined and can accept lead paint debris.
Waiting on Construction Financing
All while this was going on we have also been working with the bank for financing of the project. We have everything in place except for the final estimate from our excavator on demolition and preparing the land for the new home. Once we get the bid back from the mitigation company, that should complete what we need, and we will hopefully be able to sign a contract with our excavator and close on the loan!