Someone, sometime, has to take on the cost of dealing with lead paint.
We did with our stucco bungalow -- it had many layers of paint on it, under something tenacious that had cracked and started to peel exposing the underlying leaded paint.
The stuff that had been put on in the 1940s was 30 percent lead.
We found a professional firm that does big buildings, ships and shipyard gear and bridges and the like -- they'd never done anything as small as a house.
They use hot water carrying abrasive grit, and a suction and HEPA Filter system that picks up everything blasted off the surface. They plastic-bagged the house and worked in bunny suits and respirators.
Yeah, we were determined to be responsible. We knew when we bought the house that we'd have to deal with it.
Our neighbors have babies.
The stuff filtered and collected off our house was so high in lead that it can't be legally landfilled in California. It had to be packaged and trucked to a Nevada desert landfill.
And we got bare, clean stucco to work with.
For indoors, the lead-painted wood trim goes into landfill as well.
Lead is a horror. Don't use heat (heat guns volatilize lead and the dust gets spread around. Don't use cheap labor that exposes the workers to the lead dust and leaves much of it in your ground.
Lead paint seemed like a bargain because it was "self cleaning" -- rainwater washes off the surface layer of the soluble lead carbonate paint leaving it looking clean, depositing the lead in your ground and water.
We bought the problem. It's our responsibility now.
https://www.google.com/search?q=lead+paint+removal+hot+wet+grit+process
