Dust: the unwanted housemate

When demoing, I generally clean and vacuuming after the fact because the room is usually empty. That’s not the ideal strategy when you want to confine the construction zone’s mess.

I had to tear down a plaster wall that was surely going to spill forth a wave of loose fill insulation, dust, and chucks of plaster. This was a living room wall and I had to be neat so I could use the other 75 percent of the room during the next phase: construction.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the space to relocate the contents of my living room into another room. I could have temporarily clustered the sofa, tables, and electronics together and covered them with a tarp to keep dust out, but I never had great results that way because of the unavoidable mushroom cloud of dust you unleash when you (ever so gingerly) remove the tarp. Sealing up a room’s egresses to confine dust works, but it takes time, a lot of painter’s tape, and once you peal up a corner to leave the room it’s a pain to reseal the opening tightly.

I tried ZipWall because I needed a divider, one that would tightly seal off just enough room to demo in while keeping the rest of the house dust free. The $280 kit included a few adjustable aluminum polls that can extend up to 12-feet high. The polls use a spring and a pad to pinch a plastic sheet tight to the ceiling and the floor. Foam rails hook around the polls to keep the sides pined to the wall. The system goes up quickly.

I kept my wall up for a week after the initial demo and during the framing for new windows. The key is the adhesive backed zipper that you stick on the stretched sheet of plastic. It allows you to penetrate the plastic wall and carry things in or out without taking down or weakening the seal. Go with a heavier mil (4 mil worked for me) plastic if you plan to keep the wall up longer than a day or two. I periodically checked the seal and adjust it because wind was blowing into the room and against the plastic like a sail, so there was a little tweaking to do.

But really, are you going to use these polls enough to warrant the price tag? Well, my garage is on the small side, but I can use two polls and some plastic to keep the car on one side while I’m spraying paint, or creating saw dust on the other. That’s cheaper than adding square footage.

Note: young children, invariably, run up to the taut plastic and press against it. Some adults have also been known to recreate the Han Solo frozen in carbonite scene from Star Wars