Is Lead Paint In Your Home? Quick Test to Find Out In Denver Metro, CO
There are a number of circumstances in which you’re going to want to know about the possibility of lead paint being in your home, and in each of them, it is important that you make the time to find out if you have it or not as knowing will make the difference between whether you can move forward easily on a home improvement project or if you are going to have to call in experts to help you remove the paint first.
Such circumstances can be when you are looking to entirely renovate rooms and want to remove sections of walls, or even if you want to remove the existing paint on the walls of a room before you start to paint them anew — it is helpful to know if the paint on the walls contains any lead so that you are going to know what your next steps should be.
With all that being the case, let’s talk about if lead paint is in your home, and a quick test that you can take to find out in Denver Metro, CO.
What Is Lead Paint?
Before we delve into the tricky subject of how to determine if lead paint is in your home, we need to discuss first a bit of a history of lead paint and how it came to be that it became the villain of the painting world as it were.
For many years, most good quality paints had lead in it, and the reason for that was because of the qualities that it contributed to the paint – namely, that it helped to create certain colors that people wanted, and it also helped the paint have significantly longer durability than paint that didn’t have it at the time.
The problem then came when it was discovered that there was a correlation that could be made between being exposed to lead paint (especially if it was inhaled or ingested) and many health problems – and so in 1978 it was declared illegal to be used in home painting in the United States.
Is Your Home Newer Than 1978?
If your home was built after 1978, you can be almost entirely sure that there will be no traces of lead paint – however, there is always the slightest chance that somehow, someone managed to have a bucket of paint laying around that was not properly disposed of then and used it.
The best thing to do is to try to follow the same advice that we are going to offer you if it turns out that your home is older than 1978.
If Your Home Is Not Newer Than 1978
If you know that your home is not newer than 1978 there is a chance that you will find lead paint when you are doing remodeling.
The quick and basic test that you can do involves getting a small sample of the paint from the walls, putting it in a small sealed bag, and sending it to a laboratory where they will be able to properly determine whether or not there is lead to be found in the paint.
The best case scenario is going to be if it turns out that there is no lead in the paint – if that’s the case, you can proceed with the remodeling work exactly as you were.
If, however, it turns out that there is lead in the paint you are going to have to turn to professionals – there is no way that an individual can properly remove lead paint from a home without the use of certain equipment that would not usually be found with any given individual.
You will have to arrange for lead paint specialists to come to your home and properly remove the paint – and it’s possible that nobody will be allowed to be in the home for the duration of the paint removal process due to how toxic the paint is.
Don’t settle for just any painter when you can get the attention to detail and professionalism from Imhoff Fine Residential Painting in Denver Metro, CO. Call us today to speak with one of our professional color consultants.
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