Lead Based Paint is kind of a big deal.
It may or may not be something you are personally concerned about, but legally, it’s a mandatory topic for any home built prior to 1978.
They put lead in everything back then, including kids toys.
It was quite normal, and used for a variety of reasons, including helping paint dry faster (seriously).
But the paint is a problem when it flakes off and it gets absorbed into your system.
The most common way this happens is with little kids chewing on toys and then swallowing the paint flakes.
It’s poison.
It poisoned James Dean when he was a child. See the story below.
This does come up when it’s time for the home inspection process.
You will have to sign an information sheet regardless of the age of the property.
If your target home was built prior to 1978, you’ll have to complete a disclosure too.
While it’s not required, I recommend getting it professionally tested.
If Lead Based Paint is found, remediation can be addressed in the contract, or you can choose not to deal with the issue.
If No Lead Based Paint is found, then you are totally in the clear. And when you eventually sell the property, you can provide the testing and prove that the property is good to go. That helps your future resale value.
Learn more about Lead Based Paint here.
James Dean Poisoned by Lead?
“During the summer of 1936, just before he was to be enrolled in kindergarten class, Jimmy suddenly displayed a variety of physical maladies much more alarming than myopia. No longer rambunctious and extroverted, he became listless and easily fatigued, and he had a chronic low-grade fever. His face was pale, then a rash appeared on his arms, torso and legs. Days later, things worsened: he was vomiting a fetid, kinky fluid and passing tarry stools. Mildred (his mother), who had seen her mother endured similar symptoms, was beside herself: she was convinced that the boy, who remained eerily calm, was dying of cancer.
Two days of tests at the Veterans Administration Medical Center revealed a less malignant condition: it was severe anemia, which, if left untreated much longer, could become life-threatening. Blood transfusions and vitamin therapy comprised the only treatment at the time, and physicians, unaware of the cause, could offer no guarantee the anemia would not return. The family diet was not meager, nor did the child seem to have been exposed to any poisons. In any case, the acute phase of the illness passed by the end of July.
But in fact Jimmy had been exposed to poisons. Sixty years later, it is possible to suggest the etiology of what seems to have been a disease known as erythema infectiosum – commonly called fifth disease not because it usually afflicted children at the age of five or six (which it did), but because in the standard early-twentieth-century literature of pediatric medicine, erythema infectiosum was the fifth entry on the list.
This condition seems to have occurred because of Mildred’s habit of painting the rooms of each new home. At the time, ordinary house paints contained alarming quantities of lead: from infancy at the Seven Gables, with its exterior peeling and its interior chips, to the seasonal paints applied to each new residence, Jimmy inhaled considerable amounts of potentially lethal chemicals – not always danger for healthy adults, but invariably so for children, who are often tempted to munch the paint chips like cookies.” – rebel: The Life and Legend of James Dean, by Donald Spoto
Non Affiliate Amazon Link to this book here.