Jun 4^th, 2002

OK, now it is official. I own the home. I’m not saying that I hope to own it next week, or I will own it when we get a few details out of the way. I am saying it is mine; I own it. What a roller coaster ride. It seems like it has taken forever to get to this point but I am finally here. Now the fun begins. I’m giving the people who I bought it from two days to move so I won’t really live in the house until Saturday or Sunday.

Last week while I was at work I drove past a house where a man was out front pulling the asbestos shingles off of his house. I have never actually seen someone doing the work before so I stopped to talk to him. Real nice guy, his name was Tom, and he was more than happy to talk about it. It turns out the process is not as bad as I thought. You pay $50.00 for a permit from the city and then you just have to pack the stuff in sturdy plastic bags (he used trash compactor bags) and the bags have to be taped shut and put in a cardboard box. The boxes can not weigh more than 50 pounds when full. The fee to dump it is the same as normal garbage, $78.50 a ton. He weighed one shingle and then estimated the number of shingles on his house weighed about a ton. His house is a small home a little less than half the size of my house. He estimated to total cost for the permit, compactor bags, boxes, and dump fees would be about $350.00. He said the shingles came off really easy. He even let me pull a couple off. When I saw him he was only a few hours into his second day and he had almost half the house finished. Not bad at all.

My house is two story so I might have to rent some scaffolding for some places but that is pretty inexpensive for just a few days rental. Most of it I can do with my ladder. He said the most expensive thing was the cardboard boxes. He bought them from a moving company. I can get a lot of boxes from work for free. If his house had one ton of shingles then mine has no more than 3 tons. So if I figure a couple of weeks of hard work and maybe $500.00 and can have all of those things off. I could even store them in the garage and take them to the dump over the period of a few months. I can’t wait to get started!

I saw a house about three blocks from my house with an almost identical front porch. It also had wood shingles on the second story much like I’m assuming my house does on the second story under the asbestos shingles. It also has other similar design qualities. This house is fixed up real nice and does not appear to have ever had asbestos shingles on it. Because of the similar architectural design to my house I think it may be a better representation of what my house used to look like than either of the sister houses. This house has fish scale shingles on the very top gables, notched shingles on the main body of the second story, and the second story windows have sun bursts over them. Could be a preview of what is on my house.