Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Bring on the HazMat Team

I crawled into the attic with my Dad this morning and took a good look around. Long term, there is definitely not much room to do anything but store some boxes up there. We have a pretty crazy roof line and we've got all these perpendicular angles and support beams in the way. Though, when we get there, we'll welcome the mostly dry storage space for our paper records.

Anyway, I took a look around and found unopened bags of the insulation up there. There isn't a lot of "insulation" but there's enough that we have to deal with it in order to rewire the knob and tube electrical and add plumbing for the new bathroom (and replace the old plumbing as needed).

The unopened bag identified the stuff as "Wards Expanded Mineral Fill Insulation." A google search on that led me to a number of class action lawsuits and Vermiculite and a bummer conclusion: More than likely it's going to have to be professionally removed by a HazMat team. (Sigh, there goes the budget.)










It also looks like they started hauling sawdust up there to insulate. Nice.

2 comments:

  1. Are you going to replace all the knob & tube? In some areas, it's the law to replace all knob and tube if you do any electrical upgrades. Best to find out for sure. :) We're going to try to do a PDX visit after Xmas. Let me know when you'll be available for visitors.

    ReplyDelete
  2. An article from a couple years ago about the insulation:
    http://www.spokesmanreview.com/breaking/story.asp?ID=16813

    ReplyDelete