Ask most contractors how much dust a remodel makes and you get a reassuring answer. The real one is simpler. There is going to be dust. We put up plastic, we run negative air on the worst of it, we protect every floor somebody walks across, and some of it still finds its way into the rest of the house. That is worth knowing before demo day rather than halfway through.
There is going to be dust
One truth about construction is that there is going to be dust. Not might be. Will be.
Containment cuts the dust escaping a work area by a large margin. A large margin is different from all of it, and nobody has ever built a plastic wall that seals a house. Demo breaks material apart. Drywall sanding turns joint compound into powder so fine it stays in the air for hours. Cutting concrete, cutting tile, pulling up old flooring, all of it puts particles into a house that has heating vents, door gaps and people walking back and forth.
We would rather say that out loud at the start than have you discover it in week three. Homeowners who know dust is coming plan around it. Homeowners who were promised a clean house get angry at week three, and they are right to.
What goes up before the first wall comes down
On any job with real demo in it, the work area gets closed off with plastic sheeting before anything gets torn out. We close off individual rooms or whole sections of the house depending on the layout.
Sometimes we cannot. An open floor plan with no natural break in it does not give you anywhere to land a plastic wall, and forcing one in place that has nothing to attach to is worse than useless because it gives everybody false confidence. When that happens we say so and we plan the rest of the protection around it.
Floor protection goes down on anything we are not tearing out. Paper taped down on hard floors, plastic laid over carpet, running the full path from the entry to the work area. That path matters more than people expect, because the flooring that gets damaged during a remodel is usually not the flooring in the room being remodeled. It is the hallway everybody walked through carrying tools and debris for six weeks.
The opening into the work area gets a piece of plastic with a zipper in it. You unzip it to go in, you zip it behind you. It is a simple thing and it does most of the work.
When we run negative air
On a process that throws off a lot of dust, we set up a blower and vent it out a window. That pulls air out of the work area and drops the pressure inside it, so air flows into the room through the gaps rather than out of them. Dust goes out the window instead of under the door.
We do not do it on every job. It is worth the setup on heavy demo and on sanding, and it is overkill on a room getting paint and trim. If you want it running on your project, ask. It is a reasonable request and it is not expensive.
One thing to know about negative air is that it needs a window, and in a Cache Valley winter that means a cold room for as long as it runs. Most people would rather have the cold than the dust once they understand the trade. It is still your call, and it is better made in advance than argued about on a January morning with the blower already in the sash.
The jobs where we do not build a containment wall
There is a threshold, and being honest about it is more useful than pretending every job gets the full treatment.
Pretty much every job with a lot of demo gets plastic walls and full floor protection. If we are gutting a space, or working through multiple rooms, that is automatic. On a job that has a few hours of demo in it and nothing else, we are not going to build a containment system that takes longer to put up than the demo takes to do. We will protect the floors and the path, clean as we go, and that is proportionate.
If you are unsure which category your project falls into, ask during the walkthrough. It is a fair question and the answer tells you something about whether the contractor has thought about your house or only about the room.
Who actually puts the plastic up
Every trade on a Salt to Summit job is a subcontractor, and part of what a general contractor is doing is making sure containment is handled by the trade doing the dusty work. They put up the sheeting.
That arrangement only works if somebody checks. I ask, and I make sure it is going to happen, because a sub who is running behind is exactly the sub most likely to decide the plastic can wait until after the first day of demo. By then it is already in your house.
What we do when it gets out anyway
It happens. A zipper gets left open, a vent was not sealed, somebody carries a bag through at the wrong moment.
The response is not complicated. We Swiffer the hard floors, vacuum as thoroughly as we can, dust the surfaces it settled on, and sometimes leave the negative air running longer than the work strictly requires to pull the remainder out. Yes, clients have been upset about dust. They tell us, we deal with it, and then we look at what let it through so the same thing does not happen the following week.
Prevention beats all of it. A morning spent taping plastic properly is worth more than an afternoon spent cleaning a house that did not need to get dirty.
What we ask of homeowners is that you tell us early. Dust that gets mentioned the day it appears is a small problem with an obvious fix. Dust that gets mentioned at the end of the project has had six weeks to settle into places nobody can reach, and by then the fix is a much bigger conversation about a much bigger clean.
The clean at the end
There is a post-construction cleanup at the end of every project, and it is handled by one of our subcontractors who does that work specifically.
They dust every surface in the affected areas, vacuum, sweep, and take the space back to a condition you can move into rather than a condition you have to recover from. Construction clean is a different job from house cleaning and it needs somebody who does it regularly. A finish carpenter with a shop vac is not the same thing.
Worth checking on any bid you are comparing: is a final clean included, and who performs it. Plenty of quotes leave it out and the difference shows up on the last day, when it is too late to negotiate.
What to ask before you sign
Three questions get you most of the way to knowing what your house is in for.
Ask what containment is going into your specific project and where the plastic walls are going. Ask whether negative air will run during demo and sanding. Ask who does the final clean and whether it is in the price you were quoted.
A contractor who answers those quickly and specifically has done it before. A contractor who tells you dust will not be an issue is telling you something too, and you should listen to it.
If you want a clearer picture of what the whole project feels like from inside the house, read our piece on whether you can live in your house during a remodel, and see how to prepare your home before a remodel starts for what to move and cover before day one. When you are ready to talk about a specific project in Logan, North Logan, Providence or anywhere else in Cache Valley, request an estimate.
