Early cleanup estimates
August 18, 2007
I have gotten a very early estimate of at least $7000 to clean up my home, assuming we had all our furniture and items removed (not that I know where we’d put them…). Once the estimator gives us a final clean-up cost estimate, I will share that with you.
One of my concerns, besides where I’m going to get the money to clean up our home, is whether or not I be able to sell my home, even after it is cleaned up. Maybe I can, although I know that the market value of my home will be less, because of its history as a former meth lab. I suspect that even if the house tests “clean”, there will be a stigma attached to it that will keep people from considering it as a home for their family.
Cleaning my home is only the first problem I have to deal with once I get an official estimate of the clean-up costs. Once the house has been cleaned, I will then have to pay to get it re-tested. The first time I had it tested (see more info about that on the page link My Meth Lab Homes Story), it cost me $1,600. After the house has been cleaned, I will then have to pay $1,600 to get it tested again. What happens if the house still shows there are still areas in the house that are contaminated? I will have to get those areas cleaned again and then pay to have it tested again for another $1,600. Where will it end?
I live in rural Tennessee. It’s beautiful here (the waterfall pictured is not far from where I live), but as in many rural areas across the country, jobs are hard to come by. Good paying jobs are even harder to come by. By profession, I am a computer network and technical support specialist. I am far from being rich. If you make $15 an hour in my line of work in eastern, TN, you can consider yourself lucky, very lucky. My wife and I have learned to stretch every penny trying to make a new life in TN for ourselves and our young sons.
I am currently working 56 hours a week to try to save enough money to dig us out of the financial hole that a meth addict threw us in when he used our home to make methamphetamine. He is, by the way, sitting in a jail cell, debt free and free of the toxins that my family are being exposed to because of him. Where is the justice for people like us who were sold a meth lab home, before the meth lab laws were passed to protect home buyers?
Click here to read our decontamination update
