Deleading?

[such sweet thunder]

I think I recognize your description of your new home. Did you buy on a street that rhymes with "hurdle"? If so congrats -- that's such a pretty home in a perfect location. My wife and I were going to make an offer but ultimately decided Melrose wasn't for us for a few reasons particular to our situation. That house is really something special though.

[Boston_Burbs]

Originally Posted by NewfieMama

We went through this process when our first was about a year old. Half of our house was built in 1775 and all of the woodwork/doors are original. We had a lead inspector come in, which is a slippery slope. The inspector files a report, which is basically just paperwork that says that there is lead in your house and details where. So now when it comes to those lead forms when you're renting or selling a house (where most people just say that the presence of lead paint is "unknown")--we can't check the "unknown" box anymore because there is paperwork saying there IS lead paint in the house. But we wanted to know exactly where the lead paint was so we could tackle the de-leading process.

The cost to de-lead is very expensive. It would have been at least $40K to completelyl de-lead our house (only about 1,500 square feet of our house is original). We ONLY focused on the most critical areas, like in the windows where the sashes going up and down could create lead dust. Or areas around the doors where opening and closing could create lead dust. We spent about $10K on stripping some things and replacing others (if it was original, we didn't replace it). We also had a fresh coat of paint applied in every single room, so that was another $3 - $4K (I did half of it myself).

If I had a chance to do it over again, I would not have bothered with the inspection and the de-leading that we did. Really it was somewhat pointless since we couldn't do everything (so our house isn't lead-free), and we could have easily just spent the money to paint everything and have been done. Our girls are 3 and 5 now, so we've had the annual lead test done on them for years and it's never come back as above "normal" levels. I think my husband and I were just being overly cautious since we had one baby and were planning to have another soon, so we got caught up in it.

Yea the state makes everything so hard.

RI has much more reasonable approach

https://spoa.com/expert-slams-mass-l...de-island-law/

Plus, why should people have to get rid of priceless trim in their home? It what makes their home great.

[snatale1]

You can get kits at home depot to tell if it's actually lead or not. Most likely isn't. But if it is, me and my buddy deleaded his house years ago, rented a neg pressure machine, threw on some respirators and went to town. Save him HUGE bucks! We only went that far because we had to sand a little, many times you can just get it off with a scraper or just do the stuff at kid height. That's all ASSUMING it's even lead to begin with.

Que the lead paint police crying about a self abatement!