Video: Lead-Safe Painting Procedure

OAKLAND – Host, Sarah Rutan: If you’re unsure whether your house paint contains lead, it’s best to take full precautions and employ lead-safe procedures. Today we’re in Oakland with Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Soumil Amin of CertaPro Painters of Berkeley to learn what this entails.

Diamond Certified Expert Contributor, Soumil Amin: So, today I’m going to talk about the importance of lead safety when doing any remodeling or renovation around your home. Not only when you do the work yourself but if a licensed contractor or anybody is doing on the home for you, you should make sure you follow the proper steps. Lead safety is very important. Any amount of lead in your system is not healthy. It’s not supposed to be there. Any house that was built before 1978 has the potential for having lead based paint. Even if the top layer, more recently layers, levels of paint that were put on there did not have it on there, lower levels probably will.

So, we assume that anything before 1978 has lead and all the precautions need to be adhered to. It takes a little bit extra work but they really come through in the end to make sure the people inside the house and the people around the house are safe and taken care of. Before anybody does work to your house, you should make sure they are fully EPA certified. There is a certification that you need to take and the refresher courses to make sure you’re following the proper guidelines and you know what you’re doing. They should also be licensed with the state of California. They do checks, background checks, to make sure they’re qualified people and they know how they’re working on your house. Typically on a house, there are a couple of areas you need to be concerned about.

During the scraping phase, you need to do a wet scrape where basically you water the house down so the paint chips go straight down to the ground compared to getting into the air supply. You should cover the windows up with six mil plastic. Cover the outside of the window, tape the inside of the window so that no dust can get inside the house. Use it on the bottom of the house. Apply six mil plastic. Roll it out, duct tape it to the house so all the paint chips that come off the house are collected in the plastic and you can dispose of that properly. Notifications need to be put up so people in the house know what’s happening. And everybody should be giving you a booklet from the EPA. Very simple booklet. Tells you what you need to know, what the risks are and how things should be happening properly to insure safety for everybody around.

The crew – they should also be protected and safe. They should be wrapped head to toe with protective gear. This is a spray sock that they put over their head. These are goggles that you put into your mouth. And this is a tyvek suit so it goes full top to bottom. It protects everything and it gets duct taped at the seams. Basically the point is that there is no part of your skin that is showing or anywhere that lead chips can get inside of. There should be a clean wash station around. There should be proper protocols taken so that the employees are safe as well. So, when you get any work done to your house make sure you check out the regulations and the people that are working there are doing the work properly.

Host, Sarah Rutan: To learn more from local, top rated companies, visit our Diamond Certified Expert Reports at experts.diamondcertified.org.