Keeping dust under control while renovating a lived-in flat

Why dust spreads through the whole flat, not just the room being worked on

Fine dust from sanding plaster, cutting skirting or breaking up tile adhesive is light enough to stay airborne for hours. Every time a door opens, every draught from a window or the corridor, and every trip you make in and out of the room carries some of it further. In a panel block flat with a shared stairwell, even the front door opening pulls air through.

Central heating makes this worse. Warm air rising from radiators or underfloor heating carries dust up and along, which is why you often find a fine layer on shelves and windowsills in rooms nowhere near the work. The gap under an interior door is usually wide enough on its own to let a surprising amount through over a day.

Marking out the work area with sheeting and tape

Buy heavy-duty plastic sheeting, at least 0.15 mm thick, from a builders' merchant rather than the thin roll sold for painting drop cloths, which tears and lets dust through the pinholes. Cover the doorway first, taping the sheet to the frame on all four sides with painter's tape rather than duct tape, which pulls paint off when removed.

Where there is no door to work with, some renovators build a simple frame from thin battens and staple the sheeting to it, wedging the frame into the opening. This holds its shape better than sheeting taped straight to a plasterboard wall, which sags and pulls the tape loose within a day or two.

Seal any air vents, the gap under the sheeted doorway, and electrical sockets on the room side with tape as well. If the work involves knocking through a wall, stop: we do not touch load-bearing walls, and any wall you are unsure about should be checked before you start, not after.

Creating negative pressure with a window fan

The single most effective step is to make the air in the sealed room flow outwards rather than into the rest of the flat. Set up a box fan or a cheap axial fan in the open window of the work room, facing outwards, and leave it running whenever dusty work is happening and for an hour or so afterwards.

This drops the air pressure in the room slightly, so air is drawn in from the rest of the flat under the sheeted doorway rather than pushed out into it. Dust generated in the room gets carried out of the window with the airflow instead of settling in the hallway.

It works best with a small gap left under the doorway sheeting as the only air inlet, and the window open only enough for the fan to sit in it. A fully open window without the fan running does very little; it is the directional airflow that matters, not just ventilation.

Cleaning order during the works

Clean from the top down and from the far end of the room towards the door, never the other way round, or you push dust back over surfaces you have already done. Vacuum before you wipe; a dry cloth on a dusty surface just redistributes fine particles into the air.

A vacuum with a HEPA filter is worth having for the duration of the job rather than an ordinary domestic one, which often blows the finest dust straight back out of the exhaust. Damp-wipe hard surfaces afterwards with a microfibre cloth, rinsing it often rather than dragging dust around.

• Vacuum floors and skirting before wiping any surface
• Damp-wipe windowsills, shelves and door frames last to first, top to bottom
• Change or shake out vacuum filters outdoors, not over a bin indoors
• Wipe down the sealed doorway sheeting itself every few days, it collects a surprising amount
• Run the window fan for a while after any cutting, sanding or demolition, not just during it

If there are children or allergy sufferers at home

Fine construction dust, particularly from old plaster, sanded paint, or cutting man-made boards, is worth taking seriously if anyone in the flat has asthma or another respiratory condition. Keep children and anyone with allergies out of the work room entirely, and out of the flat altogether during the dustiest stages such as demolition or sanding, if that is at all possible.

Ventilate rooms outside the work area normally, with windows open when the outdoor air is decent, to keep dust from settling and building up. If anyone in the household starts coughing more than usual or their eyes are irritated, that is a sign the containment is not tight enough and needs revisiting before continuing.

When it makes more sense to call someone in than do it yourself

Sheeting and a fan handle an afternoon of sanding or a weekend of tiling reasonably well. A full room renovation lasting several weeks, with a family living in the rest of the flat throughout, is a different matter, and most people underestimate how tiring it is to maintain containment every single day on top of ordinary life.

If the job involves several trades in sequence, structural questions, or you simply want the room finished without the flat feeling like a building site for a month, our flat renovation service starts from 180 € per job and includes the containment and cleanup as part of the work. For smaller one-off tasks, such as fitting the sheeting properly or sorting out a fan setup that is not working, odd jobs are billed from 39 € per hour.