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.