Lead-Safe Preparation

Testing Comes Before the Scraper

Residential paint could legally contain lead in this country until 1978. A large share of Pasadena was built well before that, which means the odds on any given bungalow are high, and it also means the odds are not the answer. Two houses on the same street can be completely different. One was taken back to bare wood in a 1990s remodel and carries nothing on the siding. The one next door has six layers on the sash and none of them have ever come off.

So we test. Not the whole house as a blanket exercise, but the specific surfaces the job will disturb: the window sash and jambs, the door edges, the porch rail and treads, the fascia and the elevation that is actually peeling. Those results go in writing and get attached to the quote, so the prep method you are being charged for is tied to something measured on your house rather than to a policy.

What a Positive Result Actually Means

It is worth being clear about this, because the word tends to trigger more alarm than the situation deserves. Lead sitting in a paint film that is intact, adhered and not being rubbed is not doing anything to anybody. The exposure route is dust and chips. A film becomes a hazard when somebody power sands it, torches it off, pressure washes flaking paint into the beds under the windows, or lets a sash grind itself to powder in its track every time it is opened.

Which is why the honest recommendation on most older houses is not removal. It is stabilization. Get the loose and failing material off in a controlled way, feather the edges, prime, and put a sound coating over the top. Stripping a house to bare wood generates far more dust than leaving sound paint alone ever would, and on a Craftsman with original siding it also throws away a surface that has been there for a century.

How the Prep Changes

When a surface tests positive, the method changes and the schedule stretches. In practice that means:

• Wet scraping instead of dry. Surface misted as we work so the material comes off as chips and slurry rather than as airborne dust.
• Ground sheeting well past the drip line, seams taped, and edges weighted. On a windy day we stop, because Santa Ana conditions off the San Gabriels will take sheeting and chips down the block.
• Sanders run with a sealed vacuum where sanding is unavoidable, and hand work where a machine would be worse.
• No heat guns above the temperature where the film gives off fumes, and no open flame. Torching old paint is the one method we will not use on these houses at any price.
• Daily clean-up and removal. Sheeting folded inward, debris bagged, and off the site that evening rather than piled by the driveway for a week.
• A wet wipe down of sills, porch decks and hard surfaces before we hand the area back, because the point of all of the above is that nothing is left behind.

Friction Surfaces First

If your budget will not stretch to everything at once, the friction surfaces are where the money should go. A double hung sash rubs against the jamb every single time it is opened, and on an original window that has been painted eight times the dust it makes lands on the sill and the floor below it. The same is true of door edges, the stops behind them, and stair treads on a covered porch.

Making a sash run properly is fiddly work. The parting bead has to be free rather than painted solid, the meeting rails have to close, the glazing putty needs checking and often reworking, and the whole thing has to be primed and finished so the two halves do not stick to each other on the first humid night. It is slow. It is also the part of an old house repaint that most crews quote around and then rush, and it is the part that decides whether you are still making dust in that room next year.

What We Do Not Claim

We are a painting contractor, not a testing laboratory. We use the field testing methods available to a contractor and we tell you plainly what came back, on which surface, and how confident it is. Where a result is ambiguous, where a house has small children in it, or where the scope is beyond what a paint crew should be handling, the right answer is a proper assessment by somebody who does that for a living, and we will say so rather than talk our way past it. We do not sell certifications we do not hold and we do not put badges on a truck to close a job.

Call (626) 566-4947 and describe the house: the era, what the paint is doing, and whether anybody has already started sanding on it. That last one changes the first thing we do when we arrive.