Things have not gone as well with the flooring as we had hoped. As I mentioned before, we are having real linoleum (as opposed to vinyl, which often gets called lino even though it isn't) in the hallway and bathroom, then carpet in the other downstairs rooms.

The plan was that the lino guy would turn up bright and early yesterday and install the lino over the old floor tiles, since they seemed to be pretty well stuck down (when lino is installed, it is bonded everywhere on the subsurface, so if you have weaknesses in the subsurface anywhere then it will show up as creases and bumps, hence existing tiles need to be firmly in place). The tiles are of the order of forty years old, we think, and so if they're not loose now then they won't be loose later! We'd been blocked in for another day of the lino fitter's time today just in case things went slowly yesterday for whatever reason.

Then the carpet fitters would arrive on Tuesday next week to put down the carpet, again on top of the old tile. This was scheduled to be after the lino was installed, because they don't want to install lino after carpet. Always do the lino first, apparently.

Unfortunately, this plan hasn't worked out so well.

The lino guy didn't arrive until lunch time yesterday. He had called ahead to let us know he might be a little late, but lunchtime was rather later than we had hoped. Then he was gone again within half an hour.

The flaw in the plan was the tiles - the lino guy did not think they were as well stuck down as they needed to be for the lino, and he flatly refused to install the flooring on top of them. In fairness he did lift one of the tiles himself with no difficulty, and you have to respect someone who doesn't want to do a bad job.

But this left us with the task of removing the tiles ourselves. The lino guy said he and his fellow installers weren't going to do it, not because of some demarcation issue, but because the tiles were very likely to be made of asbestos.

Cue scary power chord.

Our house was built at the height of the "Asbestos - Wonder Material!" period, when this mineral was used in far far more places than you would imagine based on its core property of heat resistance. In our case, floor tiles were a very common application, presumably because asbestos is durable and easy to work with. As long as the floor tiles stayed where they were, there was no risk to anyone because asbestos is only dangerous when airborne. We know all of this because Jen did training on dealing with asbestos in her old job.

But removing the floor tiles was a different story - there's risk of breakage, asbestos dust flying through the air, and so on.

Jen went and got respirators and lots of the correctly marked plastic bags (complete with proper procedures for use) so we could safely dispose of the tiles, and then we spent something like 90 minutes last night filling and sealing the bags, being very careful to sweep up all the dust. We're pretty sure it's safe down there now, but I've put the door back up to stop the cats from investigating.

Now we are waiting for the lino guy to come back. We were expecting him to return this morning, but there was no sign of him as of half past one so we're losing faith that he's going to do the installation today just because of the time required. And if the lino doesn't go in by the end of Monday, then the carpet can't go in on Tuesday and we'll be back to square one as far as scheduling goes.

Disappointing.

We're so close, but that last couple of steps is taking longer than we'd hoped.

This is also making us realise just how good our builder actually was.

Posted by Dunx at July 9, 2004 02:33 PM