We here at Alair Homes Toronto do a lot of work renovating or gutting older Toronto homes and bringing them back to their original glory. One of the big fears our clients have is existing asbestos in their homes how it will affect the health of themselves and their children.

Learning about Asbestos

Asbestos itself is a strong, durable fibrous mineral that is resistant to heat, fire, and chemicals and make it an ideal additive to construction products from an engineering standpoint. These same qualities make it dangerous to our bodies and especially our lungs. During demolition especially, these small Asbestos fibres are released into the air and find their way into both workers, and clients lungs. These fibres can remain in the lungs for many years and lead to respiratory illnesses and possibly lung cancer. Not good at all, which is why it is so important to identify and dispose of it safely.

As much as it affects our lungs and bodies it unfortunately is just as devastating to budgets of clients who were not prepared for the bill. Because of the extensive process needed to remove and test after asbestos cleaning the cost is quite substantial. This is a surprise that many contractors leave up in the air until demo starts, and the client all of a sudden gets a surprise bill for often ten thousand plus dollars. In order to understand this problem and deal with it effectively both the client and the contractor need to understand the problem, where it is, and how to test and deal with it.

How To Protect Your Home and Budget

At Alair Homes we do our homework well in advance to insure our clients and our clients budgets are kept safe and well. At our Design and Estimation Stage we send in our low cost sampling team, who take small samples from discrete areas around your house of all the possible items that may contain Asbestos. These professionals will walk you through why they are testing and will often take 30-40 samples from your house. From here these samples are sent to a lab and every item is tested and checked to make sure we can quote properly for the removal of the material.

At this point we will have our removal specialist quote on removing the affected area, and will show you this along with the rest of your hard quotes to complete the project. This protects your budget, and insures there are no surprises. If approved we will send in our removal specialists. These well trained individuals carefully seal off the affected areas and then in full suits enter and remove the asbestos. Plastic with a slight tack on it is then added to the room along with an exhaust fan, and the area is left for a full 24 hours. The same specialist then comes back and removes all the plastic and carefully bagged asbestos leaving your home clean and safe.

Final Check

As a final check, we send a team in, to sample the air quality as soon as they have left. This insures that there are no asbestos fibres left in the air making sure it is safe for both our trades and our clients. Remember getting rid of surprises often takes more upfront homework, but will insure both the safety of you and your budget! Asbestos is a perfect example of just one thing that can really hurt you both financially and health wise. Give us a call or visit our website here and we can show you our full client control system that allows you make sure you are in control and taken care of before you start your next project.

Thanks for reading!

The Alair Team