Hi, LD DI! Sorry to take so long to respond to your post! Well, I think the saga is coming to a close, sort of.

I ended up not moving because I couldn't afford it and I couldn't find anything suitable and tolerable to move to!

So, I'm still in my house and it has been "remediated"--it was pretty distressing and more than disruptive. Two bedrooms and one bathroom were affected by a leak in the pipe under the concrete slab; the flooring was buckling because of water coming up the concrete foundation. The rooms were full of mold. The remediation work went as follows:

1. The flooring had asbestos in it so had to be professionally removed; this included removal of a closet that had gotten moldy and a wall needed to be ripped out to check to see if water had seeped into it, and also removal of the mastic--the glue--that held the floor tiles onto the concrete because the mastic also had asbestos in it. The stuff they put on the mastic to remove it was supposedly nontoxic--made out of beans!--but it made my whole house stink like tuna fish!

2. Huge de-humidifiers were put into the rooms to dry them out--3 days of constant loud noise.

3. A sealant was put on the concrete floors to make them non-porous so any water left under the slab would not seep up--the sealant was supposed to be "nontoxic" but stunk like hell and made me very sick. At this point I closed the bedroom doors and sealed them shut with masking tape so the smells wouldn't seep into the rest of my house.

4. Plaster had to be re-applied to the walls that were opened up/closet removed.

5. Rooms had to be repainted because of the re-plaster--I used as nontoxic a paint as I could find--couldn't handle going into the paint store because it was so toxic so the employees brought the sealed paint cans to me as I sat in my car in the parking lot--the paint was from AFM SafeCoat--designed for folks with MCS--very expensive--twice what regular paints costs. The plain flat is great and outgasses within 3 days. the problem was that the old paint on the walls--hadn't been painted in many years at a time I wasn't living here--were oil based paint. you can't put flat water-based paint on oil-based paint or it will peel right off, so a "transitional primer" had to be used. Unfortunately, the transitional primer, even though it too was from AFM, has more chemicals in it to make it "stick" to the old oil based paint, therefore it takes a lot longer to outgas.

6.floors--had ceramic tile put in and use AFM grout sealer, which outgasses very quickly--a day or two.

Upshot: I started the remediation process right after New Years--January 2008, and everything was not completed until mid-April, because after every step I'd be sick and had to take a week or two to recover from exposure before the next step was taken. I was not in the house at the time the remediation was done--most of the work took only one day to complete each step-- but given that I couldn't find a safe place to stay, I had to come home in the evening, with all the windows open and the airfilters blasting, to find that the rest of the house was contaminated with fumes, even though I told the workers about my extreme sensitivities and they did try and limit the fumes going into the rest of the house by using drop clothes and plastic sheeting. what turned out to be very ironic was that the plastic sheeting did NOT bother me--it's not vinyl, but plastic--but the TAPE that was used to tape up the sheeting stunk like heck and made me sick! (it was a blue painter's tape--supposed to come off your walls easier without the paint peeling)--we had to switch to using masking tape that I could tolerate better, but that tape peels the paint off your walls if the paint is old--so now I have peeled paint marks all over the hallways leading to the bedrooms!

During the final phase, when the rooms were being painted and the flooring put in, this took 3 days--I did stay at a friend's house, but the room she had for me to sleep in was intolerable so I ended up sleeping on a mat in her very small bathroom with the door tightly closed and my air filter blasting away! Before I left my house, I closed off the heating air ducts in the rooms of my house so the paint smell would not permeate the house through the duct system, and made sure the painters knew to close the doors to the remediated bedrooms and seal them off with masking tape and aluminum foil all around after they finished their work. When I came home after 3 days I was ok as the windows were left open and the airfilters were blasting in the house, per my instructions.

Upshot #2. My 3 bedroom/2 bath house is now a one bedroom/one bath house. The masterbedroom/bathroom and one of the smaller rooms--the rooms that were affected by the slab leak--still smell, 3 months post-remediation, like "new" construction. So, I am continuing to share the one bedroom that is left with my teenage daughter and my son is sleeping in the living room surrounded by all of his bedroom furniture, and we schedule times to use the one bathroom--this has been our situation since January. My son, praise be to God, does NOT have MCS, so he cannot "smell" anything in his room--it's a very mild smell now, even for me--smells vaguely of paint, and I'm sure it's from the "transitional primer" so he'll probably move back into his bedroom within the month. The masterbedroom/bath are off limits to all--these rooms were more badly affected by the slab leak and still have a smell to them that even my daughter can detect. This room was supposed to be my room--I've actually never lived in it because before the slab leak it needed repair work--it had been my parents' bedroom when they were alive-- and I kept putting it off, not wanting to deal with new construction until the leak forced me to. I don't think I'll ever live in it; it'll probably be used as a storage room/rec room for my kids. There's something about it I don't like, and even my intuitive daughter told me I shouldn't ever sleep in it; she doesn't seem to mind that I sleep in her room at night; during the day I stay out of it so she has her privacy.

SO, that's the update in a very long-winded nut shell! I'm just grateful the work is done, and even if I can never use the masterbedroom/bathroom, I'm thankful I have a place to live where the rest of the house is tolerable and I have a great backyard that I hang out in all of the time, plus a large living room (now occupied by son) and a family room area that I claim as "my" space.


HOW ARE YOU DOING, LD DI? Are you still living in the same place? Did you have to move?

Blessings, Liora