Blown-in Insulation Removal

Fiberglass Awareness

Page 4

An attic floor with the boards removed towards the back showing the studs and some gray fiberglass insulation and a green trash bucket with a silver trash can lid laying on top of it and a long skinny window with the sun shining in.

The removal of the blown in insluation under the floor boards was no easy task, and I am not even referring to the fact that the attic had to be emptied first. The boards had to be pried up and the thickly packed spun glass had to be scooped into trash cans.

An attic floor with the boards removed towards the back of the room with two long skinny windows with the sun shining in, two metal trash cans and a green bucket with a silver trash can lid on top of it. You can see the blown in gray fiberglass insulation between one of the grooves.

There are companies that will come in with a vacuum and suck it out with a long hose and a truck that sits outside, however we were told that they will not remove floor boards. The tricky part was once you pull up the floor boards there is no where to walk. If you stepped in the wrong place you would put your foot through the ceiling below. The floor boards also act as joist braces. We wanted to get the loose exposed fiberglass out ASAP to keep it from floating around as much as we possibly could once a board was removed. We were also worried that one of these removal companies were used to doing a removal and replace of new blown-in insulation and therefore would not see the importance of removing ALL of it and not just 'most of it.

An attic floor with the boards removed towards the back of the room with two long skinny windows with the sun shining in and two metal trash cans and white wires. You can see the blown in gray fiberglass insulation between one of the grooves.

After trying a few different methods we decided that pulling up a section of boards and scooping it out right away into black trash bags and then using a HEPA shop vac to clean up what was left was our best option for our situation, at least for this section of the three room attic.

A video posted by Fiberglass Awareness (@fiberglass_awareness) on

Collage of two images. The first image is of a pile of gray blown in fiberglass insulation. The bottom half of the image is an attic floor with the boards removed showing the grooves the fiberglass was once in.

This particular insulation reminds me of a powdery smell. Those who spent too much time inside the attic without a mask started smelling like the insulation through their skin. It bypassed their lungs and went to their blood. The same way a person who drank liquor all night has skin that smells like alcohol the next day.

Follow me on Instaram buttonFollow me on Facebook buttonFollow me on YouTube Button