Worry? No. Be aware and take precautions? Always. Wear dust mask,shower and laundry soon as day ends. Use hepa filter in vacum cleaner to collect dust. Wet mop and wipe hard surfaces often. Install high Merv filter and run hvac fan 24-7. I would consider 1/4tr" drywall over it instead of going through demo.

You think we need to drywall over entire wall? We are not removing the wall, just repairing it and painting it. The layer of wall that exposed I do not believe is lead paint. If anything, there are layers underneath the top layer -- which are only getting slightly exposed through the crumbling around holes in the wall. Would you still do an entire layer of drywall for that, instead of just patching?

"You think we need to drywall over entire wall?"

That's an option which makes lead a non-issue. I havn't seen the palce to make informed decisions.

are there little kinds involved?

Is the remaining plaster securely attached to lath or whatever is behind it? What do you mean by "crumbling"? It looks pretty straight in the picture not bowing out, not cracking - is it just your holes from the nails or is there more to it than that? If so your good to go and I would NOT drywall over - thats making mountain out of molehill because then what do you do with the baseboard and window trim - drywall butting up to it looks ugly and if you remove the trim then that can REALLY cause problems with loosening the plaster.

I would just wash walls thoroughly with tsp (or substitute) and that's going to remove any paint/plaster dust as well as soften up the wallpaper paste so that you can easily just scrub it away. Best to use some real patching plaster or at least something more substantial than that light fluffy spackle in a can that is meant more for minor touch ups and not actual plaster repair.

BTW I love those niches - will you be keeping those? Somewhere I saw a thread recently about what someone did with theirs.

Yes, by crumbling I just mean little pieces crumble out in the holes where nails were removed, or where the niches were. There are also some larger cracks running along the sides and base of the wall, where the wood furring was nailed in. The niches were boarded up with drywall and then plastered over, so we knocked out the plaster and ripped out the drywall pieces, so there is some plaster crumbling around the edges of the niches (how to fix those up will be a separate post because I can only deal with one thing at a time!). We are definitely keeping the niches -- we didn't know they were there when we saw the place, until we realized all the other apartments in the building had them. Once we removed the mirrors and saw the outlines in the wall I became determined to restore them at all costs, and I'm so glad we did. I'm all about trying to incorporate the original style/design of the place and honor the pre-war glory that this place once had. The rest of the apartment has archways so niches match nicely and really tie things together.

We were definitely planning on using plaster patching compound rather than regular joint compound after reading that the latter is not good for plaster walls. I had not heard of using TSP before but that sounds like a good idea. So far we have been using a wallpaper stripping spray (Chomp), which works pretty well. We've used up one bottle already though and are about to buy another -- you think the TSP will work better?

If its the old wheat paste (it may or may not be) then any hot water will dissolve it and make it easy to remove - would not have to be tsp necessarily although that would certainly get rid of all remaining paste residue along with all the dirt and dust on all your walls prior to painting. (By tsp I mean whatever that stuff is now, technically called tsp substitute.)

Anyhoo you might try hot water before buying a new bottle of the other stuff

Thanks! Any brand recs for the tsp? Also do we have to worry about its health risks? Hubby said he was reading some worrisome stuff about it online. I see they carry regular tsp and phosphate-free, not sure if the latter is better...

"We hadn't really thought too much about lead paint because we were just
anxious to start fixing this thing up. Do you think we are taking a
major risk?"

Unless you are sanding lots of it and inhaling the dust, or eating the paint chips, there is little risk to this level of homeowner exposure.

If you renovated 1930s apartments for a living, the risk would be a lot higher, and full protective gear would be a job requirement - because 50 weeks a year of lead dust is more than you can take.

1 - Sand as little as possible.

2 - Vacuum the walls before you patch, to get as much of the dust off as possible. And clean up daily.

3 - Wash your hands before eating

4 - Wash your clothes after the end of the day ...

==========

I love the mural - it's probably 1950s.

Thanks! This is very helpful. We don't have kids, which makes all of this less concerning. We ate sandwiches last weekend when we were there, which was dumb, but we'll be more careful next time around. As for sanding, I think the only sanding we will be doing is after the major patching of the holes, so hopefully none of the lead paint layers will be exposed at that point.

Yes, the mural is interesting to say the least! So far it's almost halfway gone. Scraping off such pasted on wallpaper has been QUITE tedious...

Warm water and dish soap sprayed on the wall paper does wonders. Tri Sodium Phosphate is also referred to as TSP, not to be confused with the TSP cleaner sold in retail stores to clean surfaces.

Eating a sandwich in that apartment is harm less unless it had dust covering it, that I doubt. Take all reasonable precautions as already mentioned above. Worry not, you need all that energy to finish you apartment.

I can tell you those mirrors went up in the late 60's or early 70's when mutton chops and Flares were the rage. I was 3 inches taller then in my platform boots. Can you imagine the stories if those walls could talk?

Good luck and have fun while you do this what appears to be your first redecorating reno.

Thought everyone might be curious to see an update: after MUCH, MUCH work on my husband's behalf (several weekends in a row in which he spent all day Saturday and Sunday working) we finally finished the wall. It took an INSANE amount of patching with plaster patching compound, as there were a ton of holes everywhere due to the incredibly stupid way in which those mirrors were mounted to the wall (onto plywood strips that each had about as many nails as could have possibly fit jammed into them at all points). Of course every time we pulled out a plywood board, the hole got even bigger from the old plaster crumbling. And some of the holes were so big they also required fiberglass tape, 4+ coats of patching compound, and lots and lots of sanding. The edges of the niches were also crumbling but he managed to rebuild them using the compound alone. Does it look brand new? No, but it looks pretty good, and saved us the several thousand dollars we were being quoted to do a skim coat. So glad we did it ourselves instead. This is just with a single coat of primer -- next step is the overwhelming task of picking a white paint!