Lead paint and repainting older Fort Wayne homes

How much of the area this touches

Lead paint was banned for houses in 1978. Census figures give the share of homes built before 1980, which is the closest cut the data offers:

Place	Homes built before 1980	Built before 1940
Van Wert, Ohio	75%	33%
Huntington	73%	39%
Fort Wayne	64%	15%
Decatur	62%	22%
Bluffton	61%	27%
Kendallville	60%	27%
New Haven	58%	7%
Warsaw	51%	21%
Auburn	50%	23%
Columbia City	46%	21%

Inside Fort Wayne the spread is wide. In Wayne Township, the middle of the city, 83% of homes predate 1980. In Aboite Township most were built after 1990. Your county property record shows the year your house was built.

When a paint job falls under the rule

The EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting rule covers paid work that disturbs paint in a pre-1978 home. For painters, disturbing means scraping, sanding, grinding or cutting. The thresholds are small:

• Outside: more than 20 square feet of painted surface. That is a patch 4 feet by 5 feet. Scraping one peeling wall goes past it.
• Inside: more than 6 square feet in a room. Sanding the trim around two windows can do it.

Rolling fresh paint over sound old paint doesn't disturb anything, so a simple interior color change on good walls usually sits outside the rule. An exterior repaint of an older house with peeling paint almost never does.

The rule applies to contractors. Indiana's health department notes that it generally doesn't apply to homeowners working on their own home, unless they rent it out or run child care there. The dust is the same either way, so the practices below are worth copying.

What lead-safe painting looks like

Before the job, the firm has to give you the EPA's "Renovate Right" pamphlet. On the job, expect to see:

• Warning signs, and plastic sheeting on the ground under the walls being scraped
• Indoors, plastic taped over floors and anything that can't be moved
• Paint misted with water before it is scraped or sanded, to keep dust down
• A HEPA vacuum on every surface, then wet wiping, before the plastic comes up
• A cleaning check at the end, with wipes compared against an EPA card

Three methods are banned outright: burning paint off with a torch, heat guns above 1,100°F, and power sanding or grinding without a shroud and a HEPA vacuum attached.

How to check a painter

1. Ask for the firm's EPA Lead-Safe Certified Firm certificate. It has a certificate number and an expiration date.
2. Look the firm up in the EPA's online locator at epa.gov/lead, or call 1-800-424-LEAD.
3. Ask who the certified renovator on your job will be. One has to be assigned to it.
4. Check that the contract says lead-safe work practices will be used.

Test kits sold in hardware stores won't settle the question for the rule. The EPA only recognizes a test done by a certified renovator, inspector or risk assessor. A painter can skip the test, presume the old paint contains lead and work lead-safe.

Children and testing

Young children are the reason for all of this. They take in lead from dust and paint chips, and it harms how they develop. The Allen County Department of Health offers blood lead screening for children from 6 months to 6 years old at its Medical Annex, 4813 New Haven Avenue. The scheduling line is 260-449-7504. If you have small children and an older house, schedule the screening and the repaint with that in mind: keep kids away from the work area until the final clean-up is done.

What it does to the price

Containment and clean-up take time, so a lead-safe exterior costs more than the same job on a 1995 house. None of the national cost guides we checked puts a figure on it, and we won't guess one. Ask each painter to show the lead-safe work as its own line so you can compare. Typical repaint prices are in the Fort Wayne house painting cost guide.

In a local historic district, the city's preservation rules add limits on how paint is removed. Those are covered in paint rules in Fort Wayne's historic districts. For the job itself, see exterior house painting in Fort Wayne.