Hello,

This is a great follow-on question to the post made by Mollydog4 last weekend.

We are remodeling a 96 year old house. The original walls are a horse-hair type plaster - we're assuming (as we've been told by many trades people) that this material is non-hazardous.

However several walls in the house were covered with a coating of decorative plaster sometime later in the house's history. I had all of the deco plaster tested, and all came up negative except for one, which came back as containing 2% (chrysotile) asbestos. Now I need to figure out what to do; this material covers the walls & ceilings in 2 large rooms - my wife wants the painter to just scrape it all off. She is unalarmed by the low % of asbestos in the plaster, particularly since we've already had to abate other materials in the house with much higher percentage asbestos (we had 100 linear ft. of pipe insulation removed from the basement, and are now having 265 sq ft of old kitchen linoleum removed that was tested as containing a whopping 40% asbestos in it). These two abatement jobs have cost nearly $6,000 alone.

So, you can imagine I'm now having a tough time convincing her of the need to professional abate the plaster containing "just" 2% asbestos, in comparison the other materials we paid to abate. There are no children in the household yet, but that is in the plan.

How serious should I be taking this plaster? If we don't have it scraped from the walls and ceiling (it's pretty thin), the other option is to just paint the walls (live with the deco texture) and then (try) to cover up the ceiling with blueboard.

I wish I could introduce my wife to Mollydog4 for his/her opinon on this! I'm ready to pay the money to abate, or at least just live with the material by covering it up with paint or board, but she's not...