Dust

A thing which never ceases to amaze is how easy it is to miss a day’s writing. It’s now 7:15am on Saturday morning and I’m getting ready to work on the house. I’ve got to pack up some of the things that I unpacked and put into the kitchen because I’ve realised the amount of dust I’m going to generate with the work on the material of the house over the next few weeks is going to be prohibitive in terms of cleaning so I will look at getting some plastic to put over my clothes and just generally reorganise where I’m going to be storing everything.

The other big job that I don’t really want to get on with is clearing out the loft. I need to remove the old metal ducting. That’s not too difficult, but there’s just lots of fibreglass insulation which isn’t very nice to handle and leaves you feeling itchy for a couple of days afterwards no matter what you do in terms of gloves and long sleeve shirts et cetera.

I know I need to do it. I went up there the other day and took a look around at what needs to be done. I’ll probably have a chat with Claude later to see whether I can reuse some of the existing insulation instead of buying completely new. There’s probably about 30mm of insulation in most of the loft when I think the recommendation is 450mm so and it’s been up there for a long, long, time so it’s horribly dirty and dusty. But I can pile it up a few layers deep to cover at least some of the space, or put it in bags and use it to stuff spaces where they crop up.

The previous owners of the house also stored a series of items in the loft so there’s a coffee table, some old books, bits of timber and other oddments. I need to go through the process of removing all of that, the good news is it looks like the way the beams are laid out I can insulate and then lay a second floor so the loft space itself will shrink but I’ll be able to put the full depth of insulation down above the ceilings.

The ceilings of the ground and 1st floor all have a sort of Artex finish on them and Artex is one of those things that sometimes has asbestos in it. I think the people put it in as a sort of fireproofing thing. While at other times it’s just a bit of Artex. I want to remove it so I can be confident there’s no asbestos in the house. The thing about asbestos is it’s a microfiber so when you take it out what you’re really trying to do is make sure it’s done in a way which means there’s no remnant. The danger of asbestos is that there is some in the environment and you then live in that environment for a long time, exposing yourself to very small amounts over a sustained period. Rather than you know the dust of working around it for a couple of days.

There are some testing kits that you can use and so I might go and get one of those, there’s also more wallpaper that needs to come off. I’ve got paint from my dad to paint the inside of the garage with and so that’s something I’ll do as well. Although I think before I started on that I should really finish some other things off. I’ve noticed I keep starting things and I’m not finishing them. I started clearing out the loft and removing all of the waste up there and I haven’t finished so I think perhaps the real goal is to pick some of the little jobs and just get them finished uh so that I can then tick things off rather than than adding more to the list. The corollary, I don’t even know how to say that word, corollary, the corollary to that problem is making it a properly prioritised task list. Then I can start at the top and work my way down and know that what I’m doing is what needs to be done next. That’s the thing to do.