The Aging House, Kids, and Lead

I want to take a few minutes to talk about concerns that renovating an old house can raise when you have young kids.  I have personally seen two instances of debilitating lead poisoning:  an acquaintance of ours has a severely autistic son for lead exposure, and my cousin, it was learned after his adoption, apparently had eaten lead paint pre-adoption, which led to numerous mental disorders requiring residential care.

~D and I have two young children.  Our daughter had just turned one when we bought the house (holy cow, how is she already 5?!) and our son just turned one as I'm typing this now.  Being an old house, we have always assumed there is lead and act accordingly.  As we do in all parenting respects, we try to take a reasonable approach:  understand that the risk exists, and try to minimize exposure to it.

Sure, before moving our things, we could have spent $20k or more for lead remediation.  I know there are some interest-free loans you can take out - check your county or town for more information - to do this.  But, to be completely honest, that was money that we did not have.

One of the ways to mitigate lead, as I understand it anyway, is to paint over it; latex paint is supposed to protect you from surface exposure.  The house was freshly painted.  The other thing you worry about is dust, from, for example, opening and closing windows that have lead paint.  We bought the house in the fall, after the time for opening windows had passed for the year.  Our daughter wasn't the type of baby to try eating window sills.  So we had some time to determine the actual risk at our house.

Before we moved in, we purchased a couple of the home lead test kits from Home Depot.  We chose some representative sections of woodworks - window sills in the most-lived in rooms, baseboards, etc.  We cut little Vs through all of the paint layers until we saw wood, and then tested them.  Just about everything came back negative.  The places that did come out (slightly) positive, are in places that we aren't too concerned about the kids getting into it, even if they suddenly turned into monkeys.

We're now tearing the kitchen apart, taking down plaster, which is raising a lot of dust.  We have found some paint that is mostly likely leaded - it is thick, has a smooth glossy finish, and is under some wallpaper.  We're assuming it is leaded.  So while we demolish, the kids aren't allowed anywhere near the kitchen.  We have plastic-ed off the demo zone, and keep the kids out of a buffer zone, as well.  We spray the plaster, and exposed lath, liberally with water while we take it down to keep the dust down.  We have a sticky mat at the entrance to the work area to grab anything off our shoes.  We use positive pressure ventilation (fan blowing into the kitchen from the foyer, and a fan in the kitchen window aiming outward) to keep the dust in the kitchen.  And we try to keep the bad paint in as big of chunks as possible.  We also mask- and glove-up to protect ourselves, and shower immediately upon leaving the area.

After a small breach this weekend, the dining room ended up covered in a fine dust (none of the suspect paint breached the containment).  We bought another test kit.  I'm happy to report that none of the dust we found, as well as ~D's shoes, tested negative.  We sprayed things with a de-leading spray just to be on the safe side, and washed everything in the dining room.  And I do mean everything.

The baby just had a lead test done, and we haven't gotten a phone call from his doctor screaming that his levels are high.  And our daughter's test when she was younger came back fine, too.  So it seems that our protocol is working.

UPDATE JULY, 2015:  The now nearly-3-year-old's (!) lead test came back absolutely fine, at about the same level as our daughter's, when hers was tested before we even bought the house.

Rearranging the Furniture

~D is a Virgo. What that means for me is he likes to rearrange the furniture. All the time. And it's not just a matter of rearranging the furniture. No, no! It's deciding that the desk should no longer be a corner desk, so we need to buy a new desk that will go better on the middle of the wall. It took a few years, and us moving into a much smaller apartment (like those number puzzles where one square is missing and you shift all of the other numbers around to try to get them back in order) to break him of it.

 So when I suggested a month or so ago that our refrigerator be moved, he was ecstatic. It gave him the rearranging that his psyche craved. I'm happy to report, our refrigerator is happily living in its new home, and we got it moved the day before our son's first birthday.

 I've learned that having a hard deadline for discrete tasks works best for us. We'll never be able to say "I want the kitchen done by the spring." It just won't happen. But "I'd like the plaster to be down by Thanksgiving" can, if we adhere to it.

We haven't completely finished the new partition/box for the fridge yet. It still needs a top, and the outside of it needs to be painted. We also need to finish up the support pieces on the cabinets that we had to cut into - facing, etc. But here it is:

Many power tools went into the making of this box. Cutting out the cabinets took no fewer than three saws (saws-all, circular saw, and a reciprocating saw). I wired my first outlet ever. It didn't growl at me when we turned the power back on. ~D moved the water line, and cut out the old one, so we still have our ice maker. He used Pex and "shark bites" - no soldering necessary, and we don't have any leaks (he worked as a plumber's apprentice for a bit after graduating from high school).

And the back end of our kitchen now looks like this:

It's nice and spacious. My kitchen feels huge now (and brighter, even with the shortening days).

Next up (beyond finishing the box and cabinet ends): Destruction! The Demo Hammer is go. The paneling covering the wall in that back end comes down, and the plaster on the ceiling's days are numbered.

You have to make a mess before you can clean a mess

At last, progress on the kitchen! I'll be honest, we haven't done much work in a while. Having a now-one-year-old, who seems to be made of velcro, makes work difficult. After he was born last fall, we did manage to close up the downstairs bathroom and do some demo, tearing down some plaster. But it wasn't much. 

We're living in a construction zone right now - the kitchen is largely unusable. Making a huge mess right now, but it'll be worth it. But I've managed to make dinner using one burner on the stove, the oven, and the grill. Hooray, for the grill! A quick reminder of how our kitchen looked when we bought the house:
 And then how it looked after we took down the wallpaper and wainscoting:
 

 While defrosting our deep freezer a couple of weeks ago, I pulled out a tape measure and started measuring cabinets and the fridge. The result: We're moving the fridge to the wall next to the closet, and putting in a low cabinet where the fridge was. In the first picture above, you see a wine rack under the window - that's where we keep our deep freezer now (after a power failure in the basement caused us to lose the entire contents of the freezer a couple of years ago). So we'll build a box for that, with the cabinet/counter next to it. It'll open up the window, maybe give us a bit more light. And we lose less cabinet/counter in the move. So here's how it looks with the hole.

 

Our cabinets are custom oak. They were built on the wall. So the hole had to be cut on the wall. Now we're redoing the wiring, both for the fridge (getting its own circuit) and some outlets for the counter. GFCIs, of course. The "pressed paperboard" duct hiding behind the cardboard stapled to the wall has been removed and we're putting in a new one. Respirators and air filters and plastic sheeting were involved in the removal, just in case.

 We're still working on making some decisions (floor, paint colors, etc.), but we're making progress, and I'm starting to have fun!