Lead Paint PSA

If you’ve been hanging around the blog for a while you know that I really love making over furniture and have several pieces passed down from my grandmother.  The awesome thing about this is I get quality furniture for the low low price of FREEEEEE.  The only downside is that some of those pieces have lead paint. I think a lot of people know that lead paint is bad, but it isn’t something DIY-ers always remember when picking up a piece of old furniture.

A while ago I bought some cute old window frames at a garage sale that I wanted to do something cool with (like this or this), but they’ve been sitting in my garage because I suspected they they had some lead paint on them and because I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do with them.  To read more about lead paint, go here.

So my first step was to figure out if it was lead paint.  So I picked up one of these little guys from Home Depot:

Its a pretty easy test… you squeeze in the center to break the little thing inside of the cardboard, then wipe it on the paint in question (if there are several layers of paint you need to cut through them so they are all swabbed by the cotton.   And now comes the results… red is lead.  And sure enough…

These windows definitely have lead paint.  So my next step will be stripping the leftover paint with a paint stripper intended for lead paint removal like this and be sure to use a respirator and gloves! And then of course, figure out something fun to do with them!