The dangers of lead poisoning are real, especially in older homes. If your home was built before 1978 there is a good chance that lead paint or pipes/solder was used.
Lead paint is generally not dangerous in its normal form and adhered to the walls but it becomes a hazard when its scraped off and ingested or is somehow removed and turned to dust and inhaled.
The EPA has adjusted their laws and now require contractors to have special certifications to work on homes older than 1978 so they know how to properly work in homes with lead paint.
There is a do-it-yourself solution to testing for lead paint and it's called Klean-Strip D-Lead Paint Test Kits and it is EPA recognized and ETA verified to test for lead and lead chromate paint. It will also determine if EPA regulated lead based paint is not present. The D-Lead Paint Test kit employs color change technology, to provide you with easy to read results in 13 minutes or less.
The kit has everything you need for six test samples and with a new baby in the house we decided to test the paint in our home.
We first cleaned the razor blade and took a paint sample from a small chip behind the door. You need to make sure and remove not just the surface paint but any layers below.
You then need to cut paint into about four small pieces and drop it into a provided solution. Shake 10 seconds then add five drops of another solution and shake again for 10 seconds. After you will see your results with a handy color coded viewer that's right on the bottle. If the solution is darker than the test color then there is a good possibility your paint has lead in it. There is also another strip to drop into the solution to verify.
This is a very easy test to do and only takes a few minutes and is worth the extra piece of mind. We're happy to report that our test came back negative even though our home was built in the 50's.
You can purchase the D-Lead Paint Test Kit, as well as other Klean-Strip products at home centers, mass merchants, and hardware stores and it will cost about $35.
You've heard the term "casing the joint" which is slang for checking out a building, bank, home before robbing it. Criminals and petty thieves will do this to mitigate their risk, junkies and kids who are up to no good won't. As long as you have some basic safety measures in place the "spur of the moment" criminals will keep walking but the professionals need more deterrents.
After attending a local neighborhood watch safety meeting and chatting with local law enforcement, they shared these tips for protecting your home.
Barriers to Burglary
Burglary is a crime of opportunity. Make their work risky and difficult, and you stand a
good chance of stopping them before they get in.
Your first line of defense
To a burglar visibility means vulnerability. They hide behind fences and shrubbery. The
key is to keep trespassers out while keeping your property visible. Use picket or chain
link fences. Keep hedges clipped down around waist level.
Falling trees are frightening -- and worse, they pose a safety risk not only to your property, but to you and your family, too. Although you can't predict storm damage, you can examine the trees on your property and determine if they pose a higher safety risk than others.
Jennifer Stell compiled a fantastic tree safety slideshow on iVillage.com that lists 13 warning signs of potentially unsafe trees. They include:
*Large, dead branches. Dead branches can fall even on a calm day, so if you notice that a tree has large dead areas, consider getting them removed.
*Mushrooms. If you notice mushrooms at the base of your tree, or especially higher up on the trunk or branches, these are signs of advanced decay--and it's probably time for the tree to come down.
*Twin trunks. Dual trunks are weakly attached to each other, posing a greater risk that high winds or ice will split the tree and cause it to fall.
As Hurricane Irene barrels toward the North Carolina coast and today marks the 19th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew (not to mention the approaching anniversary of Hurricane Katrina), there's no better time to think about hurricane safety.
If you opt to stay in your home to weather the storm, there are a few things you can do to boost your safety and help protect yourself -- and your abode -- from high winds, lashing rain and other hurricane-induced conditions. Tip one? Board your windows.
Tip two? Make sure you have an emergency kit on hand so that you have food, water and First-Aid supplies at your disposal, especially handy in case of power outage or injury.
The National Hurricane Center recommends the following items in your disaster supply kit:
