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Lead Check
Jul. 21st, 2011 08:47 amOur house was tested for lead on Tuesday afternoon. Brian worked from home to meet them and I was able to get back from work in time to be there for his review of what he found. Ron from the Lead Lab in Belmont was our inspector and he was excellent! We found him on Angie's List, and I'm so glad that we went with him.
There's only a couple of spots on our first floor with lead and a few more on the second floor. Our old basement windows have lead and some outside (old trim up near the roofline, some on our back porch, some on our front porch. The report is lengthy with one page per room and then additional pages on how to interpret it, what the laws are, and that kind of thing. Super intimidating! We'd share that with any contractors that would be pricing out the work and they should theoretically know what needs to be done. It's all gibberish to me, but now I have a handy novel of a .pdf file to share with anyone that finds this kind of thing fascinating.
Though the report is filed with the state Ron told us that it is very much a "Don't ask don't tell" kind of situation. The state will not follow up on us to see if we delead or not. If we choose not to, the only reason it would bite us would be:
A) We want to sell our house down the line and have to reveal that we absolutely know there is lead in it or
B) Our child gets lead poisoning (it is routinely checked for nowadays at the pediatrician). In this case the state would mandate that we fix it immediately, but there would be no fines or legal implications imposed. Ron joked that "for the rest of your life any time your kid did something dumb you'd blame yourself and wonder if it was the lead paint that did it", while he laughed.
We're not landlords so we wouldn't have any legal liability for tenants suing us.
Ron told us that typically when you see kids with lead poisoning it is due to neglect in taking care of the house OR in construction occuring and disturbing the lead that's there. As he said "how many kids do you see laying on the floor and gnawing on woodwork?". They use a neat detector that finds the lead in every possible at risk surface (the inspection took a couple of hours) and tells you how much there is in there. Lead was in paint and some plaster but not often (or not enough to a degree) in the old stains and lacquer. Since most of the wood in our house wasn't painted until about 10-15 years ago (post 1978, when they stopped putting lead in materials), it's why we were OK. Also, they only test "mouthable" surfaces: windows, doorways, baseboards that don't have line of angled trim on the top. If your baseboard is just a board it's mouthable, but if there is an angled bead of trim on top of that board it's not. Interesting. They test 5 feet up (our basement windows fell victim to being identified as hazards since they are only 4.5 feet up or something).
We're going to get some quotes on the work from a few different contractors and go from there. They can do one of three things: remove and replace the wood, scrape it, or encapsulate it with a special sealing paint. These cost highest to lowest in this order. Ron didn't think there was any reason why they couldn't encapsulate the wood inside our house, though he did warn us that contractors will try and do the more expensive work. The basement windows would be replaced. Door jams get scraped (too difficult to rip out and replace/too messy. Preparing for them to do the work would be a pain in the butt. We'd live elsewhere while the work was done and until inspection showed that indeed it was all gone. And then that all gets filed with the state.
For a scary inspection that I've been part dreading and part dying of curiosity about, it went as well as we could hope. I learned a lot about the industry, history of construction and all of that. Ron seemed to think that we could just leave things as is and it would probably be OK, but if the cost isn't too crazy it may be worth the peace of mind. Or maybe we'll just do parts of it. There are much scarier things in our basement to hurt a child than the couple of windows covered in lead paint that are 4.5 feet up - babe will never be allowed down there until old enough to deal with it. The outside areas are for the most part out of reach.
We shall see!
There's only a couple of spots on our first floor with lead and a few more on the second floor. Our old basement windows have lead and some outside (old trim up near the roofline, some on our back porch, some on our front porch. The report is lengthy with one page per room and then additional pages on how to interpret it, what the laws are, and that kind of thing. Super intimidating! We'd share that with any contractors that would be pricing out the work and they should theoretically know what needs to be done. It's all gibberish to me, but now I have a handy novel of a .pdf file to share with anyone that finds this kind of thing fascinating.
Though the report is filed with the state Ron told us that it is very much a "Don't ask don't tell" kind of situation. The state will not follow up on us to see if we delead or not. If we choose not to, the only reason it would bite us would be:
A) We want to sell our house down the line and have to reveal that we absolutely know there is lead in it or
B) Our child gets lead poisoning (it is routinely checked for nowadays at the pediatrician). In this case the state would mandate that we fix it immediately, but there would be no fines or legal implications imposed. Ron joked that "for the rest of your life any time your kid did something dumb you'd blame yourself and wonder if it was the lead paint that did it", while he laughed.
We're not landlords so we wouldn't have any legal liability for tenants suing us.
Ron told us that typically when you see kids with lead poisoning it is due to neglect in taking care of the house OR in construction occuring and disturbing the lead that's there. As he said "how many kids do you see laying on the floor and gnawing on woodwork?". They use a neat detector that finds the lead in every possible at risk surface (the inspection took a couple of hours) and tells you how much there is in there. Lead was in paint and some plaster but not often (or not enough to a degree) in the old stains and lacquer. Since most of the wood in our house wasn't painted until about 10-15 years ago (post 1978, when they stopped putting lead in materials), it's why we were OK. Also, they only test "mouthable" surfaces: windows, doorways, baseboards that don't have line of angled trim on the top. If your baseboard is just a board it's mouthable, but if there is an angled bead of trim on top of that board it's not. Interesting. They test 5 feet up (our basement windows fell victim to being identified as hazards since they are only 4.5 feet up or something).
We're going to get some quotes on the work from a few different contractors and go from there. They can do one of three things: remove and replace the wood, scrape it, or encapsulate it with a special sealing paint. These cost highest to lowest in this order. Ron didn't think there was any reason why they couldn't encapsulate the wood inside our house, though he did warn us that contractors will try and do the more expensive work. The basement windows would be replaced. Door jams get scraped (too difficult to rip out and replace/too messy. Preparing for them to do the work would be a pain in the butt. We'd live elsewhere while the work was done and until inspection showed that indeed it was all gone. And then that all gets filed with the state.
For a scary inspection that I've been part dreading and part dying of curiosity about, it went as well as we could hope. I learned a lot about the industry, history of construction and all of that. Ron seemed to think that we could just leave things as is and it would probably be OK, but if the cost isn't too crazy it may be worth the peace of mind. Or maybe we'll just do parts of it. There are much scarier things in our basement to hurt a child than the couple of windows covered in lead paint that are 4.5 feet up - babe will never be allowed down there until old enough to deal with it. The outside areas are for the most part out of reach.
We shall see!
