Tearing down, again.

Iain has been itching to take down the ceiling in the old cottage, for several reasons; he wants to expose the old water pipes (to remove them) and the wiring (to remove/repair), and he and I are both interested in repairing around the stove pipe where the rain leaks in.

Because the ceiling is full of vermiculite insulation, we put a plastic wall up to keep it all in the kitchen.

My Dad put this up long, long ago.

I tried to get a picture of the fungus growing down from the ceiling, but it came out a bit blurry. See those brown spots? Fungus. With spores. Yuck.

This is what happens when you ignore a situation.

We wore dust masks and still had some coughing fits! As we pulled the ceiling down, we occasionally ran outside to escape the dust. One can only hold one’s breath for so long. Having the big fan to blow it outside certainly helped. Sometimes the dust was so thick as to almost resemble smoke.

We found pink insulation, pine needles, cones – lots of squirrel-nest material, fortunately long-abandoned.

The vermiculite packed two garbage bags, and there was all the tintest and strapping to go to the dump as well. I hope the tintest didn’t have any asbestos in it – we had tested the vermiculite insulation, but I only found out recently that some tintest had asbestos as well.
Et voila! Iain is vacuuming up the bits we couldn’t sweep out. See the dust on the counter? That was everywhere.

Sorry about the angle of the shot...

We did find some leaks around the stove pipe, so we will inspect our patch job next time we are up to see if it has done the trick! I like the look of the exposed boards, but we will have to put up something to insulate it if we want to use the place at all in the heat of summer.