Out, Out, Damn Asbestos!

I started removing the asbestos tiles and mastic the same day a friend of mine pledged to be "Polly Positive" in her Facebook post.

With the help of a good-friend-former-OSHA-guy, the tiles came up with a minimum of fuss. We whaled away on the floor with scrapers and created heavy bundles of tiles, all ready to be double-wrapped in REALLY thick plastic and duct tape. Oh, yes. And he thought wearing masks was unnecessary, since we hosed down the tiles before we started. This is not what I was expecting from a former government inspector.

Then came (insert dramatic horror music here)...the mastic. This seemingly benign black layer has become the personification of evil. It is hard. It is ever-so-slightly sticky. Just sticky enough that you'd think it would be possible to scrape it up. But noooooo. Even a sharply hone chisel skids right off it, occasionally creating a tiny nick in the surface. Just enough to give you hope that if you only found the right angle, it would slice right through and peel up the gluey substance. False hope, I'm afraid.

After much online research (which at least showed me I wasn't alone in my frustration), I found a magic product called Bean-e-Doo. I call it magic because it's made of soybean oil and it basically dissolves the black mastic into a puddle of goo.

Ahhh! It was heaven. I just let the oil sit on the surface over night, came back in the morning and voila! One wipe of the squeegee revealed clean, smooth cement.

Unfortunately, only a few feet of the downstairs has smooth cement. The rest of the concrete floor was apparently spread by four-year-olds using serrated spoons. The surface is so rough the mastic slides down into the scratchy troughs as if it will still be there when global warming has run its course and mankind has perished.

The former owners apparently noticed this, and took action. First, they installed some kind of flooring using mastic. Then they took up that flooring, left the mastic, and poured on some kind of plaster-like leveling compound across the two rooms, in a spotty, unpredictable way. Then they installed another floor using a different, thick yellow mastic that doesn't respond to Bean-e-Doo. It was only then that they installed the last layer of asbestos-containing tiles, with yet more asbestos-containing mastic.

That's a long way of saying, it's been a bitch to get this junk up off the floor.

Now, as I was discovering the many layers of mastic, etc., I kept seeing my friend's post in my head: "I will be Polly Positive today." Inspired despite the many trials and tribulations, I came up with the Top Ten Things About Removing Asbestos from Our House:

10. The soybean oil solvent makes the air smell like salad dressing. (Most mastic solvents are very flammable and toxic.)

9. It builds up all those knitting muscles in my arms and hands.

8. I didn't like the clothes I'm wearing for this project anyway, and now I have a reason to throw them out.

7. My husband thinks I am amazing for taking on this project, so he's extra adoring.

6. We're saving jillions of dollars by not hiring a contractor.

5. At least they didn't tile the walls.

4. The dogs only walked across the goo-covered floor once. And we immediately washed their

paws off.

3. I've single-handedly increased Safeway's sales of scrubbies and mops for the month of May.

2. The solvent leaves my hands extremely well moisturized.

And the #1 thing about removing asbestos from our home is...

I'm finished!

That's right. The mastic is basically all removed and we're moving on to the next phase: demolition.