Lead

Just as lead used to be an additive to gasoline (because it increased gasoline's octane rating), refineries used to put lead in paint. Old houses often have lead in them, and that is a real cause for concern.

Avoiding lead is a serious matter: no one wants to end up like the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, though hatters typically went mad from mercury poisoning. Still lead poisoning and mercury poisoning are similar in that they both attack the brain with heavy metals.

So before we moved into the house, I hired Robert Kinyon of Atez, Inc. to conduct a bunch of professional lead-based paint tests. I wanted to know if sanding and refinishing the floors would release lead throughout the house.

The answer was reassuring: the level of lead in the floor was .01 mg/cm. Wikipedia says:

The U.S. government defines "lead-based paint" as any "paint, surface coating that contains lead equal to or exceeding one milligram per square centimeter (1.0 mg/cm2) or 0.5% by weight."

So that meant the floors had only 1/100th of the lead necessary to qualify as being "lead-based paint." This meant I could go ahead and hire American Hardwood Floors to refinish the wood floors.

Most other samples taken inside the house also were below the standard for lead-based paint, but two samples were high enough to qualify. Both of these samples came from the white paint on the wood trim surrounding windows. As a result, Barb and I have been quite careful not to disturb wood trim inside the house that has white paint.