Asbestos popcorn ceilings

In a few weeks we are going to own our first house. I’m so excited to finally have a house, and even more ready to make it my own. Painting, modernizing, and honey-do lists all await me. My entire life has been a practice run for home ownership. From the Legos that my dad would step on in his bare feet, to the garage full of dangerous power tools that nearly took one of my fingers during high school, and finally to the electrician apprenticeship I had while living on a kibbutz in Israel. I’m ready to swing a hammer and show my manhood.

But there is one thing about having a house that scares me more than anything else in my life. It’s not the mortgage payments, or the responsibility, or any of that adult stuff. Instead, what causes me to shake like a dog who has just been caught for pooping on the good rug in the living room is that there might be Asbestos Popcorn ceilings in every room. Not because Asbestos is a carcinogen, and can cause me to die a horrible lunch cancer death. No, as a biochemist, I willingly worked with chemicals that are known carcinogens. I know what the dangers for lung cancer are, and I can deal with them. Instead, its because it is possibly the only home improvement job I won’t be able to do.

I grew up in a 1920′s era house with asbestos covered radiator pipes. I turned out just fine, as you know from reading my writings ramblings and crazy ideas on this blog. When left alone, asbestos is as dangerous as a dead polar bear. But when you start fucking around with the stuff, it releases these little fibers into the air, which get sucked into your lungs when you have do that mundane thing called breathing. The lungs can’t do much once the asbestos fibers are inhaled, so they secrete mucus and stuff, and encapsulate those little fibers so the lung tissue isn’t aggravated. That’s what causes the cancer, or so the my brother the asbestos lawyer says.

The same way that wedding photos determine when you got married, popcorn ceilings determine what decade your house was built. Your grandparents would stand stiff-leged staring right into the camera, Your mother had a bouquet that dangled down past her knees, and just a few years ago (or months if you live in the south) selective color black and white prints with a pink rose, were all the rage. You could simply look at the photos and know what decade the couple got married.

Popcorn textured ceilings are exactly the same. They scream 1970s worse than a plaid, polyester leisure suit dancing to boogie fever. The first thing I am going to have to do is get them out!

In today’s immediate world I have grown impatient to waiting. I can pause live TV, and read my voicemails like email. But this task of modernizing a house I have yet to fully own requires patience. I can’t even get into the house to scrape a little bit into a plastic bag and send it off to the lab for analysis for another three weeks. Then, I have to wait for God knows how long before the results will come back, and then, I either get to scrape non-asbestos containing popcorn ceilings, or call out contractors to hermetically seal the rooms and remove the stuff. What am I going to do?