Ways to protect the rest of the house from building work

[hawleybits]

We're about to have some renovations to the kitchen, including walls and ceiling coming down. I'm equally excited and absolutely dreading the dust this will inevitably cause.

Other than covering as much as possible with dust sheets and possibly taping around closed doorways, are there any other tricks to minimise the dust travelling to every corner?

Not from my experience.

Tape around all the doors.
Remove ornaments, rugs etc from the rooms you'll still be using so it'll be easier to clean up.

As my DH said, you can't make an omelette without cracking eggs.... as people told me, it is worth it when it's done as you soon forget about it!

Good luck!

I remember seeing dust billowing through closed windows when work started on my extension. I gave up from the start!

Oh dear! I think it really is a case of, grin and bear it. We've only removed the old cabinets and tiles so far, in preparation for the builder and already I can feel myself getting twitchy.

I have seriously considered taping up doors that won't need to opened, outside and inside and climbing out through the windows!

When we had some removal work in our Ensuite, our builder taped a zippable plastic sheet up over the alcove to the bedroom (a bit like a tent entrance). It worked really well and the dust was minimal.

My builders built a wooden wall across the kitchen and did everything via the hole they bashed in the back wall for the french doors I was having put in.
It definitely cut down the amount of dust in the rest of the house.

We had a loft conversion last year that involved knocking down and moving a couple of the downstairs walls. Our wonderful builder built a wooden frame almost as sturdy as the studs in a stud wall across our hall and attached plastic sheeting with a staple gun. The fake wall had to be moved and reshaped a couple of times but we had next to no dust come through. We were amazed.

Admittedly it did block access to our own front door from within the house... for 6 months... But no dust!