Guest Blogger: The Best Way to Find if There’s Lead Paint in your Older Home

Guest Blogger #325, Entry #894, January 12, 2012

When you purchase an older house, like I did, most likely you are a first time homebuyer. Older houses are great because you can get this amazing duality that the land makes the price higher, but the house is in such disrepair that it can lower the final sale price.

Eventually, when you get the deed to your new home, you have to start repairing all of the places in the house where regular maintenance was disregarded. Usually there are a couple of planks in the porch to fix, a roof to re-shingle, and a ton of old paint to strip.

It’s easy enough to say, but much more difficult to do once you start. Stripping older paint is not only hard work, but dangerous if done incorrectly. Here are a few extra tips aside from the ones you normally hear about.

Learn how to deal with lead paint in your home

Image via: Stinemos

Basic:

Of course, you have to start an article about stripping old paint with what you’ll need no matter what the job is like.

You’ll need:
Paint Scraper
Old Pants and Old Shirt
Tarps
Painter’s Tape
Turpentine
Safety Mask

Basically, you use the turpentine to moisten and loosen the paint, and when it is soft enough, you need to scrape it all off of the wall manually. Please do not forget to use the mask, because a lot of old paints have lead in them, and inhaling particles of lead is a sure-fire way to hurt your health.

In older homes, lead paint should be removed

Image via: Houzz

Advanced Technique: Using the Weight of Lead Paint

The first advanced technique is for those with lead paint in their walls. Lead was phased out of paint after the Consumer Product Safety Commission ruled against it in 1977. If your house was built before that date, unless you are absolutely sure that the paint was stripped, you most likely have lead paint buried in your walls.

Taking out this paint is so important to do that I heartily recommend doing it as soon as you can. Even if the lead paint is in stable condition underneath the other paints, eventually, the lead will come into contact with moisture, oxidation will occur, and you’ll be cleaning up huge chunks of fallen paint.

There is one thing about lead paint that makes taking it off a breeze, and for this method, you’ll need a corded belt sander. Lead paint is heavier than regular paints, and as paints go, by a pretty large margin. If the lead paint isn’t too buried underneath other layers, then if you can get the lead paint soggy, its weight will help it come down off of the wall.

Grab a paint roller you don’t mind ruining, and mix 3 parts turpentine with 1 part water. Roll this on the wall once an hour until you start to see the paint bubble. Whats happening here is that the lead is weighing down the paint that has started to separate from the wall. Furthermore, the turpentine is eating away at the bonds between the layers of paint, facilitating this process.

When it is bubbly all up and down the wall, take the corded belt sander and start rubbing it all over the place. The heavy lead paint will start coming off in palm-sized chunks, literally as fast as you can move the sander. I had to remove over 2000 square feet of lead paint from my first house, and this method saved me hours of labor.

Your older home can have beautiful and safe walls

Image via: 79ideas

The Next Step: After the Wall is Bare

The real issue, you have yet to learn, is not getting the paint off, but deciding what to do once it is off. Rarely do we as homeowners give a lot of thought to the structure behind the paint unless there is a hole in it. Speaking from experience, if your house is old enough to have lead paint, you are not going to like what you find underneath.

Most likely, the wall itself is pretty rotten and dead, and you’ll have an important decision to make. Do you repaint and try to resell, or do you gut the wall and rebuild? For me, the answer is obvious; I like to leave things in better condition than I got them. However, there was an issue; I didn’t have the money necessary to fix the wall completely, which was why I was stripping the paint myself.

Instead, I spoke to a good friend and contractor, who told me a little secret. Because of modern techniques in sheet rocking, this won’t work on new walls. The secret was to use wallpaper to keep the wall together while you got enough money saved to have the place renovated. If you put more paint on a wall you have just stripped and need to replace, any cracks, holes, or sags in the wall will be exaggerated.

Instead, because of the construction of old walls, wallpaper can actually help strengthen the walls in two ways. First, because the paper binding the wall together wasn’t produced with plastic in it, the cracks that you see in the wall can actually be partially filled by the wallpaper adhesive. Second, the porous paper will bind back to the paper. The wallpaper will actually help increase the structural stability of the old wall in the short term. Usually long enough to get the money or materials together for a real renovation.

Since Wallpaper is so cheap, it should be a first option for those that plan on getting their walls redone.

Pete Wise is a DIY Enthusiast and White-Hat SEO Jedi. Discount Decorating supplied the wallpaper and wallpaper borders used to keep my walls standing. If you liked the article, follow Pete on Twitter: @MySEOHeadache or connect with him on his Google+

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