Painting Contractors and Lead-Safe Repainting of Pre-1978 Homes

Most of the housing in the older parts of Southern California went up long before 1978, which is the year lead was finally banned from residential paint in the United States. A bungalow from the twenties, a Spanish revival from the thirties, a ranch from the fifties: all of them were painted with something that almost certainly contained lead, and almost none of them have been stripped back to bare material since. What is on those walls now is a stack. The top two or three layers are modern acrylic. Underneath that, somewhere, is a layer that is a regulated material the moment anyone takes a scraper to it.

That is the whole issue, stated as plainly as it can be. Lead paint sitting intact under four coats of newer paint is not hurting anybody. The hazard is created by the repaint itself, by the sanding and scraping and washing that has to happen before a new coating will stick. A careless crew spends two days turning a stable old building into a yard full of contaminated dust and chips, and then leaves. The homeowner inherits that. It ends up in the soil under the drip line, on the porch where a toddler puts their hands, and in the vegetable bed that happened to be next to the wall.

So the honest version of this job is that preparation on a pre-1978 house is a different trade than preparation on a house built in the nineties, and it should be scoped, scheduled and priced as one. A painting contractor who has done much work on older housing will raise the subject before you do, and will raise it at the estimate rather than discovering it on the second morning. If you have three quotes in front of you and only one of them mentions the age of the building, that is information about the other two.

What the law actually asks for, roughly

The federal rule that governs this is usually called the Renovation, Repair and Painting rule. The shape of it is simple even though the detail is not. Any firm doing paid work that disturbs painted surfaces on a home built before 1978 has to be certified, has to have a certified renovator on the job, has to follow a specific set of work practices, and has to keep records. The trigger is a surface area threshold rather than a judgement call, and exterior repaints clear it easily. Scraping and sanding a full elevation is not a minor disturbance by any definition.

There are state and local layers on top of that, and in California there is a separate set of requirements covering worker protection and lead-related construction work. The specifics get revised, so the useful thing for a homeowner is not to memorise the numbers but to ask three questions and listen to how fluently they are answered: is the firm certified for this work, who on the crew holds the renovator certification, and what are you planning to do about the old layers. Someone who does this routinely answers in about a sentence each. Someone who does not will tell you it is only an exterior, or that they are just painting over it, which is not an answer to the question that was asked.

You should also be handed an informational pamphlet about lead-safe renovation before work begins, and asked to sign that you received it. It is a small formality and it is a decent indicator. A firm that has the pamphlet in the truck has been through this before.

Testing, and the case for not testing

There are three ways to find out whether the paint contains lead, and they are not equivalent.

A chemical swab is cheap, instant and done on site. Rub it on an exposed edge and it changes colour if lead is present. It is useful but blunt. It reads whatever layer it touches, so a swab on an intact modern top coat can come back clean while the third layer down is loaded. To mean anything it has to be used on a cut or a chipped edge that exposes the whole stack.

An XRF reading is done by a licensed inspector with a handheld instrument and reads through the layers without damaging them. It is the fast, non-destructive option, it covers a lot of components in a short visit, and it produces a written report component by component: south elevation siding, window sashes, porch columns, each with its own result. On a building with a lot of different elements that report is genuinely useful, because lead is rarely uniform. Trim and sashes were often finished in a high gloss oil enamel that carried far more lead than the body of the house.

A paint chip sent to a laboratory is the most definitive and the slowest, and it leaves a small hole where the sample came from.

And then there is the fourth option, which is to test nothing and treat the whole building as positive. This sounds like evasion and it is often the sensible choice. On a house of that age the result is close to a foregone conclusion, and the testing costs money that could go into doing the work properly instead. The decision turns on scale. If you are repainting everything, assuming positive and working accordingly is usually cheaper than an inspection. If you are doing one elevation, or trying to establish whether a specific element can be worked normally, the component by component report earns its cost. What you should not do is test, get a positive, and then carry on exactly as before.

What lead-safe work looks like from the sidewalk

This is the part worth knowing, because it is checkable by a homeowner standing in their own driveway with no training at all.

Containment comes first. Before any scraping starts there should be heavy plastic sheeting on the ground running out from the base of the wall, weighted or taped down at the edges so wind does not lift it, and extending far enough out that chips thrown off a ladder land on it. Plants get covered. Windows and doors in the work area get closed, and on the neighbouring property too if the wall is close to a line. There should be warning signage. If the sheeting is a few token strips laid directly under the ladder and nowhere else, the containment is decorative.

Then wet methods. Dry scraping sends fine particles into the air and across the yard. The surface should be misted first, and kept damp while it is worked, and the same applies to sanding. Any power sander should be fitted with a shroud connected to a vacuum with a HEPA filter, not a shop vac, and not nothing. Watch for a dust plume. There should not be one.

Certain tools are simply off the table. Open flame burning or torching old paint is prohibited. So are heat guns running hot enough to vaporise lead, which rules out the high settings people reach for when a layer will not move. Uncontrolled abrasive blasting and power washing used as a stripping method belong in the same category, and the power washer is the one that catches people out, because it looks clean and quiet while it sprays a slurry of paint fragments into the planting beds and down the driveway.

Cleanup is the last visible stage and the one most often skipped. At the end of each working day the plastic should be gathered inward rather than shaken out, chips and debris collected rather than swept into the shrubs, and the sheeting either folded for reuse or bagged. A final visual check across the whole work area should find no visible dust and no visible chips, including in the gravel, the grass and the gaps between pavers. If the job included interior work, cleaning is more involved and a verification step applies.

What it does to the schedule and the number

Expect the preparation phase to take longer, sometimes meaningfully longer. Wet scraping is slower than dry scraping. Setting and striking containment costs an hour at each end of each day on each elevation. A crew cannot leapfrog around the building the way they would on a newer house, because containment is tied to the area being worked. Weather matters more too, since high wind makes containment unreliable and a responsible crew will stop rather than work through it.

The second schedule effect is the consequence of wet work. Surfaces that have been misted and washed have to dry before primer goes on, and on a shaded north elevation in the cooler months that is not a same-day proposition. Any contractor who scrapes wet in the morning and primes that afternoon on a shaded wall is either lucky or about to trap moisture under a new film.

The approach that follows from all this is encapsulation rather than removal. Sound, well-adhered old paint stays where it is, under a new coating, which is both the safest handling of lead and the better building practice. Only the failing, loose and flaking material is removed, and the edges of what remains are feathered so the transition does not telegraph through the finish. Nobody is trying to take the house back to bare wood, and a proposal that says it will is a proposal to generate an enormous quantity of hazardous waste for no finish benefit.

The paperwork to ask for at the end

Keep the signed acknowledgement of the pamphlet, a copy of the firm’s certification, any test results, and the record the certified renovator is required to produce describing the work practices used on the job. Firms are obliged to retain these for a period of years, but the copy in your own file is the one that is actually available when you sell the house or when a question comes up later. It costs you one email to ask for it while the crew is still on site, and it is close to impossible to obtain two years after they have gone.