BEAN-e-doo

If you buy an older home, it will most likely come with the added bonus of asbestos. Unless you plan on renovating your home or the asbestos gets disturbed, you can live in harmony with asbestos, so the experts say. Since we planned on renovating and the idea of asbestos being in my home freaked me out, the asbestos was an unwelcomed guest and had to go. According to a few experts, building products still contain asbestos the only difference is it has a new name . . . I just can't go there at this point in my life.

We had an asbestos inspection done before buying the house, so we knew the flooring in the kitchen and main bath upstairs had friable asbestos, meaning if disturbed asbestos fibers would become airborne, so we brought in the experts, one of only two times Ron has agreed to hire work out during our renovation journey. The kitchen and bathroom floors were gone in a day. . . Woohoo! The asbestos tiles in the basement, the nonfriable asbestos that you can remove yourself, took forever, ok, it only seemed like forever. Actually, the tiles came up easily as some were already loose. What lay beneath the tiles was another story.

Mastic is the glue used to bind the tiles to the floor and what it does best in my opinion, is bind itself to the surface beneath the tiles. We had A LOT of black mastic to remove . . .1,250 sq. feet to be exact. Not wanting to deal with harsh chemicals to remove the mastic (we were still recovering from painting with Kilz, a harsh smelling primer), I turned to Google. After reading various online postings, I stumbled across a blog that lead me to BEAN-e-doo, a biodegradeable soy based miracle product.

We spread the BEAN-e-doo with a broom and almost immediately the mastic began to release itself from the cement, it almost brought tears to my eyes. Using large squeeges we moved the BEAN-e-doo mastic mixture around, scraping as needed until we had large puddles of a goopy sloppy mixture (imagine not changing your cars engine oil for an incredibly long time and then smearing it on your basement floor.) The goop was slippery like ice. I had started out wearing old cowboy boots, but switched immediately to old hiking shoes, which weren't much better, but I at least was able to let go of the walls as I worked. Once we had the goop in a large puddle, we used kitty litter (A LOT) to absorb the mess. After the kitty litter was removed, the floor was mopped with a degreaser (can't remember the name but we bought it with the BEAN-e-doo from FranMar.) The degreaser worked great and we were on our way to updating the basement.

From start to finish, the process took several weekends to complete. Like most projects this size, there were highs and lows. Having the friable asbestos and tile flooring removed so quickly was a definite high as well as finishing the job. The lows, well I'm sure you can imagine the list. At some point we rounded the corner and saw our way through to the end.