Wallpaper on Lead Paint and Lead Paint on Windows

After the initial lead paint panic and subsequent freak out, things have started to settle down and I'm able to be a little bit calmer about the lead paint issues in our house.

A few months ago we qualified for a grant with the county that pays for us getting some windows replaced in our house. We're sort of at a bit of an impasse. We have beautiful original windows on our house (it's hard to capture in a picture) and we want to preserve them as much as we can. Unfortunately, abating the lead means that we're going to have to change them in some way because windows are obviously high friction areas. We're going to be checking out some of the work that the organization has done on other homes where the owners has wanted to preserve as much of the original stuff as possible.

In the meantime, a quick update on the rest of the lead. Turns out that, other than the windows, we don't have nearly as much lead as a house built in 1927, which is good. There is some in the soil, which they recommend covering up with mulch or grass or stones. And there is some on a few walls, which are just sort of considered undisturbed surfaces.

The one area that I had really been concerned about was the front hallway. The hallway was covered in a few layers of wallpaper and then paint. Before we got lead testing, I did the scraping in that hallway. I took a few precautions, but probably not as many as proscribed by lead-safe work practices. I also got lead tested after we found out we had lead in our home. The good news is that I don't have lead poisoning.

So what did I do while scraping the wallpaper off of lead paint? I worked wet (very, very wet) with a very sharp blade. I sprayed all the surfaces with water both to get the wallpaper off and also to keep any lead dust down. I laid down plastic that I could just roll up and dispose of in a garbage bag tied with duct tape. I cleaned my clothes and myself immediately after I was done working. I did the whole thing in one day so that I didn't have to keep coming back and cleaning up.

Now, I'm not saying that that's fullproof or that that's even close to lead safe work practices (they would recommend sealing off the entire area, which I did not do), but it's what I did to get wallpaper off of a wall that I now know had lead paint and the levels of lead in my blood were negligible after that project. One of the reasons why I'm posting again on this is because when I was dealing with the whole wallpaper on lead paint issue, I did a lot of searching on the internet and didn't come up with much. Also, I took a lead-safe work practices class as part of this grant and even that class didn't cover this issue or how to deal with it. Again, not to say that I dealt with it in the best way -- just adding my experience to the mess of information.

Don't Lick the Walls: Lead Paint Freak Out

A few posts back, Eric and I were sort of paralyzed by the realisation that our house might have quite a bit of lead paint. We knew it would have some -- as most homes built before 1973 do -- but we were afraid that the lead paint in our house stood between us and completing the painting and other projects that we want to do in the next few weeks before the contractors get in there.

After furiously searching the internets (which was predictably full of half-truths and misinformation), we found a program that Hennepin County offers to help with lead abatement. We started to get the gears in motion to apply for the program and tried to figure out what we were going to do about our projects in the meantime. We decided that our wallpaper removal could continue because we were doing it wet, which would keep any lead dust down and because it was the wallpaper, not the paint, that we were disturbing. We took precautions -- covered our vents, changed and washed our clothes and showered immediately after doing the work, and cleaned up using trisodium phosphate (lab nerd Eric was ALL over that) and a shop vac with a HEPA filter.

The first phase of the lead program was some initial dust testing. Two women from the Sustainable Resources Center did the testing and advised us on how to clean around the windows, the likely source of most of the lead paint in our house. Then we waited for the results.

A week later a phone call and a letter indicated that our window sills and wells were off the charts. There was some (although not as high) lead on the floors of the entryway and the hallway where my sister and I had just removed wallpaper. Ugh. Using a home stick test, Eric and I tested the front hallway wall where we had just removed wallpaper. Pink to red means positive to varying degrees. The stick and testing fluid were so instantly red, it was like our walls were bleeding. Bleeding with lead. If we were paralyzed before, we were turned to stone now.

I called the Department of Health and explained our timing predicament. The lead lady there (and the reason I will never bad-mouth Hennepin County and the Health Department) tried to get our process speeded up. When that didn't work out, she dropped by herself with this crazy gun-like lead tester. She spot tested the walls we were worried about. Praise God and the Department of Health, the walls we wanted to work on were mostly negative. Our positive dust readings are likely from the trim, the windows, the front hall and half of the bathroom wall (the half we don't need to touch).

Finally, we're able to charge forward with our plans to remove adhesive and paint this weekend. Sweet, sweet relief.

This isn't to say we're entirely out of the woods. We're going to do our best to contain the few walls that have some lead in them, but our windows still need some serious work to get our house to be healthy. The county is going to help us out with a lot of that. It's going to take some time, but it will be worth it when our lead readings go down after that.

Eric and I were really nervous when we realised that we might have a lead problem. We tried to inform ourselves as much as possible, but there seemed to be a lot of inconsistent information out there. The best thing that has happened during this whole process? Getting tested and getting our concerns answered. We're so much better prepared to deal with this problem now that we know what in our house is of concern and what is not. Before that, I practically didn't want to touch anything in the house and definitely didn't want my sister's kids over there. Now at least we know which walls they can and cannot be licking. I highly recommend getting tested if there's any concern about lead in your house -- testing alone won't solve your problem, but at least it will help you figure out what to do next.

In the meantime, the work in our kitchen has continued. There's probably lead paint on the window, but for now we're not touching that. We ripped off some wainscoting and mudded the tile adhesive covered areas underneath. We've done a few coats now and should be able to paint the kitchen this weekend. Here's Eric, feeling good about the mud and good about the lead situation:

Eric's family will be down again and we even have a little project for the kids to work on (my sister's kids, not Eric's brothers).

The garden is doing great. The tomatoes are getting huge. The radishes, beans, peas, and carrots are abundant. We're a little worried about the edamame (soy), okra, and squash (did the birds steal some seeds or did we get a bunch of duds??), but the melon looks good. This picture is from a week ago and things are already much greener this week. I'll try to post more current pictures soon.