4 stages of cleaning building dust and ways to minimize pollution

The walls are glued with wallpaper, the ceiling is painted, the laminate is laid, and it seems that you can already breathe a sigh of relief and begin to celebrate the completion of the repair, but the smile quickly disappears when you realize that a tedious cleaning of building dust awaits you. It seems that it will not be possible to cope with this scourge faster than in a few weeks, but we know how to clean an apartment from dust after repair without resorting to the help of professional cleaning companies.

The importance of preventive measures

You need to think about cleaning the room after the repair before it starts. In paints, imagine how hard and how much time you will be tearing your apartment: this image will help you understand that it is better to take care of the cleanliness of things in advance by taking measures to save them from fine, omnipresent dust.

• Remove everything that can be removed from the room: from indoor flowers and curtains to furniture, if you can remove it without much difficulty. Collect the little things in boxes or bags and take them out of the room. The fewer items left in the room, the less things you will have to dust off.
• If the thing cannot be taken out and it does not interfere with the repair, you need to protect it from building dust, which immediately eats into upholstered furniture and is simply attracted to appliances. For this, construction protective polyethylene film is best suited, which completely covers the product, securing it with tape so that the dust certainly does not have a chance to get to the subject.
• We also advise you to populate the floor with film, especially if it is already completely repaired. Although, if you are going to lay the floor during or after processing the walls, the film will not hurt the rough screed: to remove debris, it will be enough to remove and throw it along with construction waste.
• The window should also be protected from pollution: particles of building dust can be hard, which means that micro-scratches will probably appear on the window when you intensively wipe off the dust that has settled on it. At the same time, the window is closed together with the window sill and slopes: if the plastic is a little rough, then it will be very difficult to wash off the dust that has eaten into the recesses, plus do not forget about the risk of the same scratches.
• Even if you make repairs in only one room, be sure: without certain protective measures, dust will spread throughout the house, penetrating even the most secluded corners. How to avoid this? It is enough to curtain the doors leading to the renovated and other rooms with a damp dense cloth or polyethylene so that the canvas covers the cracks in the doorway.

Tip

Stock up on a respirator during repairs: building dust is not as safe as household dust, and you don’t want it to settle in your lungs.

Where to start and how to finish the cleaning?

If you think that we will tell you how to remove building dust in a couple of minutes without much effort, then you will be disappointed: in any case it will take more time and effort to clean up than usual. But no complicated manipulations to wash off the dust are required from you. True, only if you did not ignore the first section of the article and protect the floor, window, furniture with appliances and other small items as much as possible.

• Garbage collection

Before you begin to deal with dust, you need to remove larger debris that remains after the repair. In part, this can be done manually, but if you need to sweep small pieces of wallpaper or plaster, be sure to moisten the garbage first, otherwise the dust will rise into the air and you will have to wait until it settles before proceeding to the second stage.

• Dry cleaning

When the dust has settled, the room needs to be thoroughly vacuumed, but so that the dust does not fly away while you are walking with the vacuum cleaner from corner to corner, we advise again to humidify the air in the room a little. The broom in this case, even with a damp floor, is not very effective: it is better to use a powerful vacuum cleaner with a paper or plastic collector.Vacuuming is better in 2 stages: before you remove the polyethylene protection from things, and again - a couple of hours after.

• Wet cleaning

Wait a few hours before wet cleaning so that dust from the air settles again and wet clean the room. There is no need to torment washing vacuum cleaners and electric mops: a large amount of construction dust can ruin them. Use ordinary rags that are not a pity to throw away, because a fresh clean rag is the only effective way to deal with white stains. Before cleaning, such rags will have to be changed about five for the floor and 1-2 to wash the furniture, where dust has settled, which could not be removed in the previous steps.

• Fair cleaning

Now it remains to clean the apartment in the way you are used to. Wash the floors with a special tool, wipe off the remnants of dust settled on things. The gradual settling of dust residues is absolutely normal, so in the first weeks after the general cleaning, be prepared to wash floors and wipe horizontal surfaces a little more often than usual.

In general, you can cope with cleaning even with maintaining pauses for dust settling in one day, which is pretty good. The main thing is not to forget that this is largely due to preventive measures, and take care of protecting things in time.

Purely where they don’t litter ...

To your fair remark that it is simply impossible to not litter during the repair, we will answer that it is quite possible not to start the situation and keep clean many things clean. To do this, all contaminants must be removed in a timely manner, and not wait for the accumulation of mountains of construction waste. Then, upon completion of the repair, it will be possible to get off with relatively easy cleaning, and not spend days on throwing, rubbing and washing away what could have been thrown out, wiped and washed during the repair work.

• The primer from windows, floors and other finishing surfaces must be wiped off immediately, otherwise it will not be possible to wash it after drying and you will have to use a knife or putty knife with the risk of ruining the surface.
• Stains from polyurethane foam, oil paint or drying oil are removed immediately, since after drying they can only be washed with special solvents.
• Construction debris needs to be taken out daily, as well as easy dust removal. So after the repair you have to get out just a little bit.
• When repairing, open the window as often as possible: dust in the air will partially leave the room.
• Use a spray gun: so that the dust settles faster and does not spread throughout the room and apartment, moisten the walls and ceiling before sanding, removing the old coating and drilling. You can also humidify the air after these manipulations in order to “nail” the dust to the protective film with which you covered the floor.
• During drilling, you can use special nozzles - dust collectors - or a vacuum cleaner. This method is more suitable for small jobs such as hanging shelves or fixing a baguette when it is impractical to mess with polyethylene.

Tip

Sometimes during the repair, an air humidifier is used, if this does not contradict the requirements for the work performed. So the dust settles quickly, you don’t need to run around the apartment with a spray gun, and the air becomes safer without small particles of construction debris hanging in it.

Do not be lazy to carry out high-quality preparation for repair work, clean up in their process and apply our tips to minimize the amount of building dust, and then cleaning after repair will not take you much time!