Home Remodeling near you

EPA's renovation rule applies to all renovations performed for compensation in target housing and child-occupied facilities. "Renovation" is defined broadly enough to cover most of what a remodeler does: removing, modifying or repairing painted surfaces or painted components, sanding and scraping and other surface preparation that may generate paint dust, removing building components such as walls, ceilings, plumbing and windows, and weatherization work such as cutting holes in painted surfaces to blow in insulation. Nothing in that list sounds like lead abatement, and none of it has to for the rule to apply.

The way out is not age or opinion but measurement. The rule exempts minor repair and maintenance activities, defined as work that disrupts 6 square feet or less of painted surface per room for interior work, or 20 square feet or less for exterior work. Two conditions ride along with the numbers: none of the work practices the rule prohibits or restricts may be used, and the work must not involve window replacement or demolition of painted surface areas. Replace one window in a 1950s house and the exemption is gone no matter how small the opening is.

The rule also closes the obvious workaround. Jobs other than emergency renovations performed in the same room within the same 30 days must be counted as the same job when deciding whether the exemption applies, and when a painted component is removed, the entire surface area removed counts as painted surface disturbed. A contractor who proposes to do your living room in four visits is not making the job exempt; they are making it a single job with four site setups.

The site setup is the part a homeowner can inspect from the hallway, and the rule is unusually specific about it. For interior work the firm must remove furniture, rugs and window coverings from the work area or cover them with plastic sheeting or another impermeable material with all seams and edges taped or sealed, close and cover all duct openings in the work area, close the windows and doors, and cover doors with sheeting in a way that lets workers pass through while confining dust. The floor, including installed carpet, has to be covered with taped-down sheeting for 6 feet beyond the perimeter of the surfaces being worked on, or far enough to contain the dust, whichever is greater.

Three tool practices are prohibited or restricted outright, and they are the ones most likely to be argued about on site. Open-flame burning or torching of painted surfaces is prohibited. Machines that remove coatings through high-speed operation, including sanders, grinders, power planers, needle guns and abrasive blasting, are prohibited on painted surfaces unless they have shrouds or containment and a HEPA vacuum attachment collecting dust at the point of generation, operated so no visible dust escapes. A heat gun may be used only at temperatures below 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit.

There is no national contractor licence, and the states do not even agree on what triggers one. Two examples show how wide the range is. California's contractor law does not apply to a project whose aggregate contract price for labor, materials and all other items is less than one thousand dollars, and only where the work does not require a building permit; the same section says splitting an operation into contracts below that figure to evade the chapter does not help, and that the exemption is unavailable to anyone who advertises as a contractor or who employs another person to help with the work.

Virginia instead sizes the licence to the money. Class C contractors handle work where a single contract or project is over 1,000 dollars but less than 30,000 dollars, or where the total undertaken in any 12-month period is less than 250,000 dollars. Class B covers a single contract of 30,000 dollars or more but less than 150,000 dollars, or a 12-month total of 250,000 dollars or more but less than 1 million dollars. Class A covers a single contract of 150,000 dollars or more, or a 12-month total of 1 million dollars or more. Virginia also requires a master tradesman licence as a condition of licensure for electrical, plumbing and HVAC contractors.

The practical lesson is not to memorise either state but to ask the right question. Find the board that issues the licence where the work will be done, check the licence number against that board's own register rather than a certificate the contractor hands you, and confirm that the class or classification on the register actually covers the size and type of job you are asking for.

Before work starts in a dwelling unit, and no more than 60 days before it, the firm must give the owner EPA's lead pamphlet and either obtain a written acknowledgment of receipt or obtain a certificate of mailing at least 7 days before the renovation. If the owner does not live in the unit, an adult occupant has to be given the pamphlet as well, with the same choice of acknowledgment or certificate of mailing, and a firm that cannot get a signature must certify in writing the address, the date and method of delivery, the names of the people who delivered it and the reason no acknowledgment was obtained.

Certification is not a one-time badge. EPA issues an approved firm a certificate with an expiration date not more than 5 years from approval, and a firm must be re-certified every 5 years to keep it. A re-certification application counts as timely only if it is postmarked 90 days or more before the current certification expires; a firm whose certification lapses must stop performing renovations until EPA certifies it again. Renovation records must be kept and made available to EPA for 3 years after the renovation is completed, and that retention period does not override longer obligations under state or tribal law.

Staying put is the default for most US remodels, and it is workable when the work is contained to a wing or a floor and the kitchen and at least one bathroom stay in service. It stops being workable when containment is the point. A lead-safe interior job seals the work area, covers duct openings and keeps dust inside a plastic envelope that only works if nobody walks through it, so a household route that crosses the work area every morning defeats the method the rule requires.

Decide the question before demolition rather than during it. Agree in writing which rooms are the work area on which dates, which door is the crew entrance, where waste will be stored between days, and what the arrangement is for pets, who cannot read a plastic barrier. If small children or anyone pregnant lives in the house and the building is pre-1978, treat temporary relocation during the dusty phases as the normal choice rather than an extravagance.