I’m not sure if this is the correct spot in the forum for this, but I was just hoping to get some opinions – sort of “what would you do in my shoes”. I will apologize ahead of time about this lengthy post.
So, I had somewhat recently learned that old vinyl sheet flooring can contain asbestos. After learning about that, I had sort of a sick feeling, thinking back to when I first bought my house about 15 years ago at this point. as a younger person then, I tackled some projects, doing my best with limited skills and knowledge. For reference, the house was built in the mid 70s.
In one of the upstairs bathrooms, after pulling out the old sink vanity, we realize that there was two layers of older vinyl sheet flooring that was making the floor very uneven. The plan was to tile, so I intended on removing all of the sheet flooring to the subfloor. So, I went to work with trying to peel, scrape the sheet flooring, which I remember finding to be next impossible. Unfortunately, at that time, I decided to use a palm sander to try to remove some as well. This too, proved to be ineffective with removing very much of it. All in all, I ended up with probably about a square foot and a half of at least partially hacked up sheet flooring. At that point, I had decided to put a self leveling floor concrete mix over the floor. I tiled over that. The concrete made a complete encapsulation of the broken up section of the old flooring.
Although it’s been 15 years since that stupid case of “ I didn’t know what I didn’t know”, I’m wondering if at this time there should be some remedying of the situation that I should do. Since that time, we’ve had a handful of vacuums that we’ve used for normal house cleaning and at one point we had a pretty high grade model known for its HEPA filter and ability to not be leaky through other parts of the vacuum. I guess I am wondering if other areas, like walls and behind larger objects in the house and generally places that don’t get much cleaning, should be addressed further? My thought would be to perhaps rent a real good HEPA vacuum and clean as much as I can. Perhaps wiping down walls in what not. A number of the rooms in the house have been Repainted, so I’m not sure how relevant that may be here.
We don’t have children, which is good because I think I’d be way more concerned about the whole thing.
One thing that I really do not want to do is to get involved with testing for asbestos. On my end at the moment, I just prefer to treat it as being suspect for asbestos and Address it outside of any testing, if that makes sense.
Thank you in advance for any thoughts he might be able to share with me
So, I had somewhat recently learned that old vinyl sheet flooring can contain asbestos. After learning about that, I had sort of a sick feeling, thinking back to when I first bought my house about 15 years ago at this point. as a younger person then, I tackled some projects, doing my best with limited skills and knowledge. For reference, the house was built in the mid 70s.
In one of the upstairs bathrooms, after pulling out the old sink vanity, we realize that there was two layers of older vinyl sheet flooring that was making the floor very uneven. The plan was to tile, so I intended on removing all of the sheet flooring to the subfloor. So, I went to work with trying to peel, scrape the sheet flooring, which I remember finding to be next impossible. Unfortunately, at that time, I decided to use a palm sander to try to remove some as well. This too, proved to be ineffective with removing very much of it. All in all, I ended up with probably about a square foot and a half of at least partially hacked up sheet flooring. At that point, I had decided to put a self leveling floor concrete mix over the floor. I tiled over that. The concrete made a complete encapsulation of the broken up section of the old flooring.
Although it’s been 15 years since that stupid case of “ I didn’t know what I didn’t know”, I’m wondering if at this time there should be some remedying of the situation that I should do. Since that time, we’ve had a handful of vacuums that we’ve used for normal house cleaning and at one point we had a pretty high grade model known for its HEPA filter and ability to not be leaky through other parts of the vacuum. I guess I am wondering if other areas, like walls and behind larger objects in the house and generally places that don’t get much cleaning, should be addressed further? My thought would be to perhaps rent a real good HEPA vacuum and clean as much as I can. Perhaps wiping down walls in what not. A number of the rooms in the house have been Repainted, so I’m not sure how relevant that may be here.
We don’t have children, which is good because I think I’d be way more concerned about the whole thing.
One thing that I really do not want to do is to get involved with testing for asbestos. On my end at the moment, I just prefer to treat it as being suspect for asbestos and Address it outside of any testing, if that makes sense.
Thank you in advance for any thoughts he might be able to share with me
