I spent the morning helping paint a roof, and then lolled around in the sunshine reading while the Prince fixed up the bits where I'd dripped blobs of paint on things. I am not what you'd call a perfectionist, especially when it comes to things all the way up on the top of houses.
At the house warming party we went to last weekend, our hosts told us that their roof was made of asbestos. What is asbestos, exactly? I've been meaning to google it all week. I have always pictured it as a sort of insulation type thing. (Huh - a fibrous mineral, often mixed or woven into things for its flame retardant and insulating qualities. There you go. I had always thought of it as looking like insulation, and was wondering how someone's roof could be made of it.)
One thing I'm terribly happy about regarding our new house is how well kept it is. I think the owners really did plan to spend many many years there, and it is beautifully painted and tiled in a way that speaks of their great fondness for the place. There are wooden benches dotted throughout the gardens and lovely natural landscaping around the house. It's not somewhere where we'll have to unpack and then make a list of renovation jobs, which I'm enormously grateful for. I hate the process of moving, and I imagine it would be far worse if you had substantial work to do on a house once you got there.
I will never ever understand people who are passionate about renovating houses, especially those who buy and sell houses in rapid succession, renovating as they live in them. I met a woman a few weeks ago who was discussing her love for renovation, and the fact that she's been living without a kitchen for the last six months. With three children. And this is a voluntary situation. Lunacy.
6 comments:
Uhh...isn't asbestos cancerous? And that's why no American school can have it anymore and people have all sorts of problems for it and get money from the government to live, 'cause we used asbestos throughout the fifties and fucked up a lot of people? You speak as if it's so normal to have an asbestos roof, but isn't it bad?
Lots of old houses here have asbestos roofs and sometimes walls, AR - you're just not supposed to touch them in any way that will release fibres (ie by drilling holes in the wall to hang pictures) until you get professionals to replace them. But you can live with them quite safely otherwise.
I'm pretty sure asbestos=death, but if you Aussies think it's ok, then more power to you!!!
Ok, mom has enlightened me. She says that asbestos is like lead paint: as long as you don't go fucking with it/eating it, you're good. But we used asbestos for insulation a LOT. And the stuff was all loose and blown around through the ventilation systems and started getting in lungs and killing people. So THAT is why so many schools had to be shut down and cleaned the fuck out.
My bad, you're safe.
Nice photo, but not the right caption. While there is a paintBRUSH in the photo, the most interesting thing is the paintTHUMB.
We seriously considered buying a house from the 1870's that hadn't really gotten a good going over since the 1950's. It had once been a very nice home, then in the 1930's, someone had made it a storefront with a home over, then in the 1950's, they'd made the first floor a soda fountain/candy shop. Since then, the owner and the building had grown old together.
It was beautiful, and still had the original wallpaper in a couple places, hidden under vast swathes of lead paint. On the third floor, there was even a window overlooking the harbor. In the end, though, we decided that we'd never get all the work it needed *done*, especially with my health. The current owners appear to be working miracles, however.
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