Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Home Lead Inspection Results

The city brought their preferred lead inspector out to the house today.  Our house is pretty "hot"...as in positive for lead paint.

Every outside surface of our house was positive for lead, with at least some of it being very high in lead.  When I say "every", I mean EVERY...the door, the threshold, the porch floor, the walls, the trim, the window trim, the window sills, the porch columns, the bottom half of the porch columns which is painted brick, etc.

The walls of our school room, living room, and dining room have lead but none of the trim.  Our kitchen ceiling and walls have lead, as well as one of the windows.  In fact, that one kitchen window is the only window in the house to have lead on the inside.  My daughter's ceiling and closet have lead but nothing else in her room.  Our bathroom is clean.  Upstairs is clean.  They will be coming out another day to test the water and the soil in our yard.  We already know the soil is positive from tests years ago.

It looks like the exterior of our house and most of the first floor will get painted by the city using grant money from the state lead program.  We may also get a new front door and threshold.

My top priority is to get the application in so the city can process it.  There's some outdoor carpeting that previous owners installed on part of our front porch and all of our back porch.  He told us to remove it.  DH's tools from doing to flooring need to be removed from the house.

I have to clean in a certain way.  He wants me to use disposable wipes, folding into fourths.  I use one side and do one wipe in a single direction. Then flip it over and do the next stripe in a single direction.  Then unfold to exposed unused portions and wipe the next stripe in a single direction, turn it over do the next stripe.  Then unfolded all the way and use the other side in the same manner.  I'm to never wipe back and forth or in circles or reuse a side for more than one stripe.  This is for the window ledges, floors, and dusting.  This is the compromise...he really wants me using something like TSP and a three bucket mop system with the rinse water being changed regularly...but that would destroy our brand new floor.

He also thinks our kids shouldn't really be playing outside in our yard because of the likelihood of lead being in the dirt (we live in an area contaminated by an old smelter).

Finally, we need to keep a watch on Maddie's lead levels.  He wants me checking mine, too, since I'm nursing...which costs $70 each time.  He expressed concern over me nursing...but I'm reading conflicting information about mom's with lead exposure nursing.  I'm not convinced that weaning would help.

It's a nightmare.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Gosh, I'm just floored - this whole thing is so awful and you and Scott must be freaking out! I'm so sorry this is happening!!!