Zip Up the Mess
I always get frustrated with "renovation containment" as I can never seem to keep dust and debris from rooms we are working on from getting into other parts of the house. This was maddening enough BEFORE baby. Now, with a wee one around, my anxiety skyrockets whenever I think of renovation messes and I have to hug my HEPA vacuum cleaner close to my chest in order to calm down. (Breathe, breathe)
This is my heritage. Not enough OCD to keep my closets well-organized. Just enough to sit and pick lint off of the rug AFTER I've vacuumed. It goes without saying that you could eat off of the floors (or walls or ceilings) of my mother's house. I inherited her anxiety about dirt but I have an intense dislike of repetitive cleaning (it has to be a recessive gene), which is a recipe for disaster.
As we will be working on this house for years still, we saw fit to invest in a ZipWall. Why? Well, everytime we try to seal off a doorway to an area that we are working on, the plastic always sags, or pulls away from the wall, or is hard to get through without mangling it. For the sake of time and convenience, we have begun setting up the ZipWall to protect the rest of the house from the next project.
We can't review it yet, because we aren't finished setting it up and it hasn't seen a lot of action.
But getting the plastic up with the poles was definitely easier and cleaner than mucking around with taping the plastic up.
The zipper works beautifully for getting in and out of the space. I wish it was re-usable when you set up another wall. But you need to purchase a new one everytime you take the wall down and set it up again somewhere else. Unless you re-use the plastic too and are very careful. We'll see.
The poles we purchased can be extended to 12 feet long (just enough for our ceiling heights) but there are other poles which extended to 20 feet. We need to figure out how to install the foam rails too.
It will help that we're setting up new rules for working in a workspace (and Aaron is humoring me by following them). No clothes leave the work area except to go straight to the laundry. This includes shoes. Luckily, one of the bathrooms is in this work area so we can just shower and change in there. Or else we would have to keep those shades down all of the time for scary naked dashes from the work area to the upstairs.
And no one wants to be seeing that.
As we get to work, we'll see how well the dust stays out of our living space. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
(4)
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Comments
Oh Jeanne, I feel your frustration! I wonder if our house will *ever* be dust free and clean feeling again! I was just talking to hubs this morning about imposing a "no shoes on in the living room" rule. Yes, we just have old painted subfloor now (painted white, no less!), but I can't stand looking at it after about a day of being tracked all over. The "no shoes" idea didn't go over well, either, so I'm just going to have to live with trying to clean it with a very lightly dampened mop every couple of days. *sigh*
"Not enough OCD to keep my closets well-organized. Just enough to sit and pick lint off of the rug AFTER I've vacuumed." Ha!! I love it! That is so me!
Posted by: Twilightmama | July 22, 2006 1:49 PM
I relate to this. We have had alot of success with double walls of plastic. I bet the zip wall will be pretty good
Right now our den is walled off by plywood and that has kept all of the dust out of the rest of the house, but then this is only possible because there is access to that room through the basement- not the usual set up.
We learned the hard way to tarp off- by not tarping and seeing the dust pile up.
Posted by: Jocelyn | July 22, 2006 7:57 PM
I work at a hospital and they recently had to do some construction work in the post-op area. I think half the time the crew was there was spent building the dust containment setup. There were even large sticky pads on the floor like welcome mats to pull any dist off their shoes when leaving the area. It looked like the house in ET!
Posted by: ben | July 22, 2006 8:37 PM
Wow! They have a product for everything, huh? This would have come in REALLY handy when I was drywalling a wall in my bathroom. Or when my painters were taping, mudding and sanding my family room. My kitchen felt gritty for weeks!
Posted by: felicia | July 31, 2006 2:14 PM