Protecting your home from dust during a flat renovation

What dust actually gets into, and why it is worse than it looks

Sanding plaster, cutting tiles, or knocking through a stud wall produces dust fine enough to pass through the gap under a closed door and through keyholes and electrical socket cut-outs. In Tallinn's older stock, especially Kalamaja and Nõmme wooden houses with looser joinery, doors rarely seal well enough to stop it on their own.

In panel buildings from the Soviet period, the exhaust ventilation shaft usually runs vertically through the whole stack of flats. If you disturb it, or leave your kitchen or bathroom extract grille open while sanding nearby, dust can be drawn into the shaft and turn up in a neighbour's flat two floors up. This is the complaint that most often turns a private renovation into a building-wide argument.

The practical implication is that dust control is not just about keeping your own sofa clean. It is about isolating the work area from every route out: the door gap, the vents, and any socket or light fitting you have opened up. Treat all three, not just the obvious one.

Which sheeting to use and how to seal off the room

Use polythene sheeting of at least 0.15 mm for taped-up doorways and furniture covers; anything thinner tears when you brush past it. Builders often use a zip-door kit — a plastic zip sewn into a sheet — fixed across the doorway with a batten and tape, so you can pass in and out without dropping the whole barrier each time.

Tape the sheeting to the door frame with a low-tack painter's tape rather than duct tape, which pulls paint and varnish off when removed. Run a second strip of sheeting along the floor threshold and weight or tape it down, since most dust escapes at floor level rather than over the top of a doorway.

If the room has more than one opening — an archway into a hallway, a serving hatch into a kitchen — seal all of them the same way. One untreated gap undoes the rest of the barrier, because dust finds the path of least resistance.

Sealing vents, sockets and anything else with an opening

Cover the ventilation grille in the room being renovated with plastic sheeting and tape, and do the same for any grille in an adjoining room if the shaft is shared. This matters most in panel-block flats, where the exhaust duct connects several flats in the stack; a sealed grille in your own kitchen does not help if the bathroom grille next door is open to the same shaft.

Switch off the circuit before removing socket covers or light switches, and tape a sheet of plastic over any open back box you are not working on immediately. Fine dust settles into contacts and switches and can cause problems later even if nothing looks visibly wrong.

If the renovation involves opening walls near existing wiring, that work should go to a qualified electrician rather than being handled as part of general dust control. Covering an open socket safely is one thing; working live cabling is another.

Floors and furniture you cannot move out of the room

Anything you can move out, move out — into another room, the hallway, or temporary storage. What is left, cover in place. Roll furniture into the centre of the room away from walls and dust-generating work, then wrap it fully in sheeting taped at the base rather than draped loosely over the top.

For floors staying in place through the renovation, use a heavier protective layer than plastic alone: corrugated cardboard or a proper floor protection board taped at the joints, laid before the plastic sheeting rather than after. Plastic alone is slippery underfoot and tears under tools and debris.

If the existing floor is coming out anyway, there is little point protecting it — it may be simpler to remove it early and deal with the subfloor as a work surface until the new flooring goes down at the end. That is a job we also do as a standalone service, from 15 € per job, once the mess-generating work is finished.

• Move what you can out of the room entirely
• Group remaining furniture centrally and wrap fully, taped at the base
• Lay board or heavy cardboard on floors before plastic sheeting
• Cover ventilation grilles and open sockets before starting
• Seal every doorway and opening, not just the main one

Cleaning between stages — the step most people skip

Most people clean once, at the end. This means dust from the demolition stage gets ground into surfaces by the plastering stage, and dust from plastering gets sanded into the paint stage, each layer harder to shift than the last. Cleaning between stages, not just at the finish, is what actually keeps the job manageable.

Vacuum with a machine rated for fine dust rather than sweeping, which just redistributes it into the air you then breathe. Wipe down surfaces with a barely damp cloth afterwards; a dry cloth pushes dust around rather than lifting it, and a wet one can smear plaster dust into a paste.

Reseal the barrier — retape any sheeting that has come loose, replace torn plastic — before starting the next stage. A barrier that worked for demolition may have gaps by the time you reach sanding, and it is worth two minutes to check.

When to leave the dust protection and clean-up to someone else

A single room, done carefully with the steps above, is manageable for most people with an afternoon to spare before work starts. Where it stops being worth doing yourself is a multi-room renovation, a flat that stays occupied throughout, or a building where several flats share ventilation and a mistake becomes a shared problem rather than a private one.

If you are already booking us for a flat renovation, from 180 € per job, dust containment and interim clean-up are handled as part of the job rather than as an afterthought. For a smaller task — sealing one room properly before you start your own work, or a deep clean between stages — odd-job hourly work from 39 € per hour covers it without committing to the whole renovation.