Do you know how to identify quickly when a certain house is built? You will know the age of a house or what decade the house is built by looking at its ceiling.
Popcorn ceilings are famous in the 1950s up to 1980s. Popcorn ceilings are those ceilings with rough looking paint, like how popcorn looks like. This is where the popcorn ceiling got its name.
Popcorn ceilings became popular because of different reasons. Some say that popcorn ceilings are good sound absorber. This has caused a time when popcorn ceilings are also called acoustic ceiling. Popcorn ceilings also conceal and hide the flaws of the ceiling like cracks and some mistake while painting. Others also say that popcorn ceilings are very easy to make.
There are also some negative comments about popcorn ceilings like they are very difficult to clean, especially when you wipe it. Stubborn dirt may cling on to hard to reach areas. The top negative thing about popcorn ceilings concerns the human health. Almost all popcorn ceilings from 1940s to 1980s contain asbestos.
Asbestos is a natural mineral that is flexible, soft and able to resist heat. This makes it a favorite among house and structure builders especially during the mid 20th. However, when asbestos was proven to cause lung cancer and other deadly diseases it was banned from being used to build houses. The fibers in asbestos cling on to human tissues and organs through inhalation. This is why the lungs are the favorite destination of asbestos fibers.
Before you panic and think of worse things, you have to know that not all popcorn ceilings built in the golden years of asbestos contain asbestos. You can choose to either keep your popcorn ceiling as it is or have your ceilings tested for asbestos if you want to remodel or renovate the house.
If you are planning to renovate, you have to test first if asbestos is present in your popcorn ceiling. There are a lot of businesses that test the presence of asbestos in the ceilings. They take a portion of your popcorn ceiling and test if the sample contains asbestos.
If the result is negative, you can relax and proceed on remodeling your house. However, if the result is positive, you have to decide to remove the popcorn ceiling provided that you do not remove it by yourself! This is very dangerous as you will inhale the asbestos fibers as they will be present in the air. They are very small fibers that the naked eye will not be able to see. The danger is also this: asbestos fiber, once inhaled, will forever stay in your body’s tissues.
Contact an asbestos abatement center that focuses on removing house parts that positively contains asbestos. Just make sure that you contact the established ones as they are the experts in this type of work. Ask them about their additional service of making sure that no trace of asbestos is present in the room after the removing of the popcorn ceiling.
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