Wow, lots of work on the old house this past 10 days without a lot to show for it but I think the “turning point” is near where things will start to feel more like the big progress I was hoping for.

The little back porch is completed with some 3/4″ cedar boards that are really pretty and I got at a great discount of .50 per foot. This wood is somewhat thin for a porch though ~3/4 fir was the most common porch board historically around here so it looks correct.

I’ll seal it with special stain today (Red Cedar transparent deck stain) and it should look super nice that way, though I may eventually have to paint this to be consistent with the house exterior paint job. Historically the (clear and gorgeous) woods used in construction were stained dark or painted.

A bottleneck has been the proper removal / disposal of the asbestos sheet flooring that was in kitchen and popcorn ceiling in living room (which may contain asbestos). You can pay a small fortune to have this work done or do it yourself as owner, so I’m doing it. Like so many environmental “evils”, the story of asbestos is really interesting and confusing. The more I know about the many issues (which is quite a bit now), the less I seem to understand. Here’s a neat asbestos identification guide from NY.

Asbestos went from wonder material used in millions of houses and thousands of schools and buildings to despised cancer-causing nightmare material requiring very special disposal procedures. There is a substantial bureaucracy in place via the DEQ to give advice about removal procedures but they won’t help identify the materials. For that you need lab analysis at $20 per sample. I’m treating the ceiling popcorn stuff as contaminated but should have had it sampled because it’s messy and if it’s *not* asbestos I could do this work faster, but it’s almost done now. The ceiling stuff scraped off smoothly after wetting using a sheetrock taping blade. I covered the floor with the 6 mil plastic required for disposal (2 layers of 6 mil plastic, both layers sealed with duct tape for most of the disposal wrapping though I can also use a cardboard box, sealed with duct tape and then wrapped with 6 mil).

Hey, maybe I AM making good progress!