Renovating My Old House

Homes built and/or renovated from 1930-1970 can contain asbestos materials.  Even though materials containing asbestos were not manufactured after the laws were updated in the 1970's, materials already produced and stockpiled were allowed to still be used in construction.  But why worry about the specific years of all the materials in your house?  Just test them and be 100% confident. Asbestos can be in vinyl flooring (the tiles themselves) and/or the mastic used to glue them to the floor.  It can be used in the padding around hot pipes or as the insulation in attics.  It can also have been used in exterior siding, and mixed in paint and compound to create a textured look.  Honestly, it was a plentiful and cheap material, and possibly could have been mixed in and used anywhere in an old home. Since we had a couple of ceilings and walls with texture/popcorn paint, we decided to get it tested before doing a project where we would scrape and sand it off the wa...

Our house is a Cape Cod house, so the bathrooms on the second floor are small and have sloped ceilings.  The master bedroom has an en suite bathroom, which in our area is an uncommon luxury.  In fact, most houses in our area only have 1 bathroom in the house--usually on the second floor.   So having a bathroom in the master bedroom, albeit small, is something we greatly appreciate.  Although 1950's construction was built to last forever (or ~70 years in our case), things have gone wrong.  For us, it was a leak in one of the pipes for this bathroom which we could not fix by going through the ceiling of the room below.  Additionally, we had mildew and peeling/chipping paint on the popcorn ceiling from poor ventilation (fan vents are not required in our area if the bathroom has a window so we bought this house without bathroom fan vents).   We didn't just renovate the master bathroom.  We completely gutted it, changed where the fixtures wer...