Water main break collapses a house and what is the fastest way to ruin a toilet?

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[00:00:41] Eric Goranson: Hello, Caroline. Hi. How are you? Good. You look like you got a contact high going right there. What's going on over there.

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[00:00:56] Eric Goranson: Erica's healthy home expert having to run through a [00:01:00] wall.

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[00:01:11] Eric Goranson: never use bleach on a porcelain surface select.

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[00:01:42] Eric Goranson: When you put bleach on it, it makes those larger and deeper. So when you have a very smooth surface and dirt hits it, right. It tends to slide off of there. But if it's like really porous, then it gives places for dirt, mold, mildew, [00:02:00] grime, and hard water deposits, places to grab a hold of. So if you use bleach yeah, absolutely.

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[00:02:35] Eric Goranson: So it's an easier cleaning toilet.

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[00:02:58] Caroline Blazovsky: Or you can use straight hydrogen [00:03:00] peroxide if you prefer.

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[00:03:06] Caroline Blazovsky: Tiny

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[00:03:17] Caroline Blazovsky: So when someone's just dumping cups of bleach and they have no idea how much they need to.

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[00:03:24] Eric Goranson: then that's how I ended up. Well, you're out here. You're always getting it on the side. You know, it's, it's splashing up in there unless you're pre diluting. It tone to a specific ratio that I don't know what that is. You know, I don't know where that line is between.

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[00:03:52] Caroline Blazovsky: But

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[00:04:20] Eric Goranson: And push it off its foundation, mostly collapsed it and pushed it down closer to the street. And so one house is totally destroyed. Had some collector cars in the garage, which is sad, of course, but it doesn't look like anybody died, but there's 17 homes in the area now that are evacuated because of that water main.

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[00:04:57] Eric Goranson: Yeah. And sometimes water main breaks under our street or a [00:05:00] roadway.

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[00:05:16] Eric Goranson: And that's because it's, it's moved all that in there. But when that's on a hill that that can literally take the whole hillside with it. Yeah. And then the other one that I thought was interesting this week too, and this is an interesting discussion because a, in Montclair, New Jersey, not far from you, right?

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[00:05:40] Eric Goranson: right up the road. So family seeks to tear down 1905 historic house, and they're reviewing the site because of a contamination. So basically. This is, what's crazy about this, and you gotta almost think about it like your [00:06:00] car, you know, you get your car into a car accident and there's that point where they go lots of total.

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[00:06:26] Eric Goranson: So a little bit of the new story here. That's coming out of Montclair, local news over there, the applicant, Steven and Leah, uh maranas who bought the property in 2017 for 1.4 million plan to renovate are now asking to demolish it. So what happened is, uh, they started doing some plumbing work on the house.

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[00:07:13] Eric Goranson: Then they had to do a remediation effort to get all the asbestos out of the house since October, 2018, the couple and their children have been living in temporary housing at $8,000 a month. In addition to the applicant's paying 8,000 each month on their mortgage. And carrying costs on the property. The insurance company on the project has paid almost $700,000 for a specialist remediation costs with the project.

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[00:07:46] Caroline Blazovsky: Mm that's a bad, bad nightmare. Can you imagine being the contractor? And you're the one that called the cause of plumbing leak. And now look at the ramifications. I mean, that's just a bad [00:08:00] day. I mean, that's why you have to use insured contractors. This is a perfect reason.

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[00:08:10] Eric Goranson: Yeah. It's just furthermore, according to abs environmental report dated in may, the asbestos contamination is so severe and extensive that the house cannot be fully and safety safely abated without demolishing the structure. I mean, that's incredible.

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[00:08:43] Eric Goranson: sure. It was an, all the plaster and drywall in there. Right. So if you got it, you know, it's just like popcorn ceilings and you had it in the mud. And then the problem is I get what they're saying though, because.

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[00:09:10] Caroline Blazovsky: Well, they probably, and we go through this with whether it's, you know, silica, dust testing, or mold testing, or chemical testing, you know, you just keep coming back and testing and testing and they probably get all these, you know, repeat tests.

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[00:09:25] Eric Goranson: Yeah. Yeah. Which, which tells me one thing though, they've already paid at least $700,000. The insurance company has. So my concern is, is for a contractor, a lot of contractors are only supposed to carry a million dollars in insurance policy.

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[00:09:45] Caroline Blazovsky: That's right. That's right. And so that's why you kind of want to add. I mean, I, you know, being in the mold remediation business, I carry double the amount of the insurance, because I mean, what if we make a mistake? What if the house is, [00:10:00] you know, um, more on the expensive side and you've got other ramifications, but this is a perfect example.

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[00:10:09] Eric Goranson: You think about it and you call the insurance company, I've got a million dollars. Great. These people here, we're just getting some updates sent around the house. They wouldn't have ever thought that there was going to be a million dollar claim on their house. And it's beyond that, cause I'm sure they're paying for the hotel.

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[00:10:40] Caroline Blazovsky: so where does that kick in? Right. So think about, you've got the contractor that caused the leak.

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[00:11:03] Eric Goranson: Well, it was, it says it though that the contractor caused the leak.

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[00:11:13] Caroline Blazovsky: that, but that leak only went through. Let's just say it was in the basement and that affected the basement portion, right? Yep. It sounds like they're saying the whole house is bad. So what I'm saying is it's got to, if the first floor and the second floor have something going on, they probably have as best as going throughout the whole building that.

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[00:11:36] Eric Goranson: how I see this as is they had a, they came in and took out, like, let's say it was on the first floor and the basement was finished or they tore it out, down there. And you took out the ceiling down there that asbestos, within a matter of an hour is completely filled in the entire.

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[00:12:12] Eric Goranson: So I think what it was is that you have the contractor that, that created the leak. They went back to fix. And it's the fixing that, that that's got them in this bind because they ended up getting that as best as in the air. And it looks like they didn't test it. Of course,

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[00:12:37] Caroline Blazovsky: I would say that that has probably had an asbestos problem prior to they just, I mean, that would be my argument, right. If I was defending the contractor and I was called in to defend him, I would say that there was probably another type of problem there too. And they uncovered it simultaneously. So be interesting to see, I think both insurance company, I think the insurance company is going to ante up on inspect in, on consultants.

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[00:13:02] Eric Goranson: like the insurance company was, has already said that they were going to replace the house is what they kind of hint at. That's why they pulled the demolition permit because they want to make it right. So they're going to actually replace the house.

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[00:13:19] Eric Goranson: And this would be the contractor's insurance. It would have nothing to do with the homeowners since the contractor broke or created the water leak. And then that contractor came back. And tried to fix it as well.

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[00:13:36] Eric Goranson: Yeah. Well that, or they, or they just dove in and removed a lot of asbestos containing materials.

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[00:14:03] Eric Goranson: Yeah. But even if you had a, some ceilings, great example, some ceilings up there, if you get a four by four area and it was like lath and plaster and it was just a mismatch of whatever. Cause you know, it's an old house. There's a time that the contractor looks at and goes, you know, the only way to do this right.

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[00:14:51] Eric Goranson: And we'd pull the skylight out patch the roof in it was all good, but it was easier to tear down because of the popcorn ceiling they had in there that wasn't [00:15:00] as best as it was easier for them to go in and pull that ceiling down than it was to deal with that drywall because they were, it was, they were going to put more labor into dealing with the popcorn than they would have not just pulled the whole thing down.

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[00:15:26] Eric Goranson: It's hard to say. Well, you know, you think about it. Most of that as Bestos was dove in about the time that drywall was coming out, cause drywall came out in the thirties and forties is when you really started to see it kind of start to pop out into the marketplace.

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[00:15:47] Caroline Blazovsky: Uh, it was called vermiculite. Does that sound

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[00:16:09] Eric Goranson: That's for Mikila.

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[00:16:27] Caroline Blazovsky: Right. It wouldn't have any of it, but some of them can, and maybe it did. I think so

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[00:16:52] Eric Goranson: Vermiculite there's a whole run in the ground of asbestos and they'd pull these minerals out, [00:17:00] but nothing's pure. There's always going to be some of that mixed in. And so, yes, they're pulling it out of the same part of the ground, but the what the dump truck just switched over and grabbed a whole thing of asbestos.

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[00:17:24] Caroline Blazovsky: Vermiculite there we go. That's a great

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[00:17:34] Caroline Blazovsky: Oh yeah. Eric said crack. We said crack so many times in our basement episode. I went back and I was listening and I'm like, Eric, do you realize, we said crack like probably 10,000 times.

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[00:17:50] Eric Goranson: it cracked you up? Did

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[00:17:58] Eric Goranson: Well, coming up on Saturday, we've got a, [00:18:00] we got a fun show, head doughy. We got a kid show coming up. This is going to be awesome. We've got, uh, our number one. We're going to talk about dealing with neighbors and being a good neighbor and how not to make your neighbors mad too. There's ways to get around that depending on the neighbor.

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[00:18:29] Eric Goranson: Oh yeah, I've got great neighbors. You have great neighbors. That's all good. But we're gonna talk about that. And then our number two, we've got Nick miles, our auto expert coming on. We're going to talk about trucks.

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[00:19:02] Eric Goranson: And we're just going to do a deep dive on pickup trucks, which would be kind of fun

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[00:19:23] Eric Goranson: yeah.

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[00:19:42] Eric Goranson: Or is that a hiding off until a hiding off until a springtime

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[00:20:04] Caroline Blazovsky: Section, you know, I have side sidelights and a door, so it's become a whole thing. So it's more about decisions and deciding what I want there and what, what looks good. Like I have a 1962 house. So how do you modernize it without making it look like it doesn't feel.

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[00:20:25] Eric Goranson: It's not that classic rocket aids look at house. It's more of a traditional sixties house. Yeah. It's like

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[00:20:50] Caroline Blazovsky: Yeah, but yeah, doors are overwhelming the door, the amount of doors you can choose from and the style. And so it's more trying to match the style and, [00:21:00] um, but I, like, I saw some things that from Anderson I liked. Um, so I don't know. We'll see, we'll talk about it more as we progress on the project, I guess.

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