We live in a 1920s frame house. We knew when we bought it that it would need to be painted in the not-too-distant future, and we started getting estimates back in the spring. The painters are prepping this week and I am trying to remain calm.
(Whenever I think about remaining calm, I remember my advisor from my master's program. He was a very intense man, and his approach to relaxation techniques in therapy was to lean into a client and urge him, with furrowed brow, "REMAIN CALM." Soothing it was not.)
We have some lead paint to deal with, and we've been talking for a long time now about how to manage it safely. The painters were supposed to scrape while the paint was wet, to cut down on the dust. I'm still worried. Do you think they'd mind if I followed them around in a hazmat suit, spritzing the siding with water as they worked? They were supposed to shop-vac all the mess at the end of each day, but yesterday they did a less than thorough job with brooms instead. Today they're working by the doors, so I'll need to request a more exacting clean-up if they take the same tack again. Right now there's no way in that's not strewn with paint chips.
My friend in the neighborhood, who also likes old houses but freaks out about lead, was talking me down earlier. Be fanatical about hand-washing, she said, and about taking shoes off inside. Give the boys calcium supplements at night and iron supplements in the morning, so that they'll just excrete any lead they take in instead of absorbing it. Don't panic.
REMAIN CALM, as my professor would have said. It's going to be a pretty creamy yellow when they're done. (Glad Yellow, it's called -- an appropriate color for the Gladly house, no?) I just wish we could jump from here to there without the mess and bother in between.
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