Home Improvement Consideration

Karen Kaye
3 min readSep 26, 2023

Have you ever thought about making any type of home improvement to your home? Well, there are several things that you must consider first when your house is built. If a home was built before 1978, you have lead paint in the home.

You also must consider plumbing, what type of pipes are there. You want to know that the old lead pipes were removed, and there is no lead getting into your water supply. You must make sure that all the asbestos has been removed from the home, which must be done by specialists wearing specialized gear and equipment.

When considering painting your home you need to make sure that it was not just painted over, because lead paint will stay, if not safely removed. What to look for in finding lead paint?

One of the telltale signs of lead in paint is “alligatoring,” which looks like reptilian scales when the layer starts to crack and wrinkle. If paint creates a chalky residue when it rubs off, it could also contain lead. It can be tough to spot chalkiness if the original paint has new layers on top of it.

Painting over lead paint can be considered a form of “encapsulation,” which is one of the EPA-approved ways to remediate lead paint hazards. However, this requires the use of a special material called an “encapsulant.” Regular store-bought paint by itself is not sufficient to safely encapsulate lead paint

What is en·cap·su·la·tion noun

  1. the action of enclosing something in or as if in a capsule.

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Karen Kaye
Karen Kaye

Written by Karen Kaye

Hollywood Happenings is an on-line community newspaper, created, copyrighted and trademarked in 2003. I am an award winning sports writer, Red Carpet interviews

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