Zipwall
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Most of the dining room furniture has migrated (temporarily I hope) into the living room, along with miscellany like a ladder and shower buckets. The hazy blue smudge you see through the right side of the zipwall is the roof tarp hanging down outside the window. For ironic humor, note that the brown book on the coffee table is the scrapbook of our 1991 Tree Event, with the front-page newspaper picture of us catty-whumpus on top.
That’s today’s new vocabulary. It’s a registered trademark for a system for isolating areas within a building, for construction or whatever. What we got isn’t the full shebang I see on the Zipwall website, but instead merely the zippers (here’s the zipper link; beware of instant audio!) applied to everyday sheet plastic.
So now, thanks to the miracle of tape and plastic, the exterior air is isolated from our living space. Along with the portable HEPA filter unit the contractor brought over, we expect to reduce our allergen load compared to the last few days—which really hasn’t been so bad the last few days, but with today’s rain, can be expected to ramp up.
The result of all this is that our staircase, punctured in the devastation, is now bracketed by zipwalls at top and bottom, so a night-time foray to the necessary room is somewhat like camping or a safari, but with two “sssssssshhuhtttt” moments as you complete your passage through the stairway airlock.
I am learning to plan ahead*.
* Learning is the operative word: I made two trips to accomplish this blog entry—one for the camera, and a second for the forgotten transfer cable.