THE OUTBUILDING NOBODY SCANNED

He thought he'd checked
all the boxes.

Pre-listing inspection passed. Lead paint disclosure signed. Renovation receipts in a folder. The two-year-old came back at 14 µg/dL six months after move-in.

1953house build year
14µg/dL · child blood lead
6mobetween move-in + result
01

What the inspector caught.

The trim downstairs. The garage door frame. The original window mullions. All flagged and either replaced or encapsulated.

i

What a standard inspection misses.

Sub-floor under linoleum. Inside-of-cabinet paint. Painted concrete in the basement. Old garden hoses. The crawl-space liner. The detached boatshed.

02

Where the lead actually was.

The boatshed. A separate 1950s outbuilding the family had been using as a playroom on rainy weekends. The interior trim had four layers of paint, the bottom-most lead-bearing, the top-most cracking.

I had the trim tested in the house. I never thought to test the boatshed. That is where they were every Saturday.

— Case 042
03

The home-test counterfactual.

!

Five minutes with the kit.

A drip-and-UV scan of the boatshed trim before the kids stepped inside would have caught the source in five minutes. Remediation could have been done pre-move-in. The blood test would have been normal.