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Comment by lazyasciiart | Hacker News Reader

> Usually these materials are fine if left in place

Maybe in Norway you need to tell people to chill over it. But the current attitude to asbestos in DIY spaces in the US/UK is far away from that, and a lot closer to “yea go on just tear it out yourself, you’ll be fine if you put on an n95 and spray some water first”.

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I think the dominant attitude in the US is to stick your head in the sand. Tons of older homes have asbestos yet almost zero of them report it in their listing or their disclosure report. If you test it and find it you have to report it. If the buyer tests it and finds it, the seller doesn't want to know because then they'd have to report it. Somehow knowing the house has asbestos lowers it's value significantly more than willfully not knowing + almost certainly having it anyways.

Happened to me. Bought a house with wood floors in the basement. We had some flooding which ruined the wood and when we ripped it out to replace, turns out the wood floors were installed over the original asbestos tiles. From what I can tell, the asbestos tiles themselves were of no particular danger to us, but once they got wet and started cracking they had to be removed which cost an additional couple thousand dollars on top of replacing he floors.

Yes because proper asbestos removal is very costly and people don't want to deal with it, your house is going to look like the government coming for ET. Very tempting for a singular homeowner to just read up and rent some ventilation equipment and rip it out themselves on the down low even if dangers are very real. There are some old mental asylums in my hometown, beautiful stone buildings on massive property, they have been sitting vacant and decaying for years because they are full of asbestos and no one wants to deal with it.

Yes, I'm talking about once you're at the DIY stage thinking "should I pull down that ceiling/wall myself? Should I even test it for asbestos?"

> current attitude to asbestos in DIY spaces in the US/UK

Nope, same attitude here.

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