Please have your children and selves immediately tested for lead excess via a simple blood test! Some labs may suggest hair or nail clippings too. Send your multiple paint scraps off to your state lab after you call them first and get the address to their lead testing department or state handpicked lab. Each state has an office specific for lead paint issues. Something doesn't sound right given the age of the house and layers of paint you are taking off. I agree with the PP to immediately secure the areas you have worked in with plastic from the rest of the house. You might want to have a lead paint abatement crew come in and clean up. This could be a very serious situation medically. Cleaning off the potential dust from your bodies, hair, nail-beds can be done with advice, with clothes and shoes replaced with new until with 100% certainty lead paints presence or absence is determined. Here is an abstract on the most popular home lead check test which shows a high falsely negative test percentage. Take care and resolve this issue definitively. "There has been a long-standing need for a technique that can provide fast, accurate and precise results regarding the presence of hazardous levels of lead in settled house dust. Several home testing kits are now available. One kit manufactured by Hybrivet (LeadCheck Swabs) is advertised as able to detect lead dust levels that exceed the U.S. Environmental Protection AgencyâÂÂs dust lead standard for floors (40 üg/ft2). The purpose of the study was to determine the ability of LeadCheck Swabs to instantly detect lead in dust above EPAâÂÂs hazard standard. A trained risk assessor collected two hundred LeadCheck Swab samples side-by-side with standard dust wipe samples. The result of the LeadCheck Swab (positive (pink or red) or negative (yellow to brown)) was compared with the laboratory results for the corresponding dust wipe (over or under 40 üg/ft2). The LeadCheck Swabs produced a false negative rate of 64% (95% confidence interval: 55%, 72%). The likelihood of a swab producing a false negative depended on substrate (painted or non-painted) and surface type (floor or sill). Changing the interpretation rule by classifying all swab colors except yellow as positive yielded lower false negative rates under some test conditions, but still produced high error rates. LeadCheck Swabs do not reliably detect levels of lead in dust above 40 üg/ft2 using published methods under field conditions. Further research into alternate methodologies and interpretation guidance is needed to determine whether the swabs can be appropriately used by consumers and others to test homes for lead dust hazards." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2170477/

My point in posting the picture was not the "sealant" (which in this case is actually stone adhesive) used, but what happens when there is seal failure, so it didn't matter what the sealant was. The point I was making was with seal failure you get moisture infiltration into unsealed, porous stone, and mold/biofilm growth (slime in the crack and into the stone). Silicone will weakly re-bond, but it is a low percentage of the original bond strength. I would guess folks with seam failures that have called out a repair that is AGAIN failed after the SECOND failure often do not call back the SAME repair person. This is not to say there are not long-term silicone seals if there is non-mobile support under the sink. But let's be real, there are a whole lot of installs out there designed to last only past the warranty period, and it's buyer beware. It's a real treat when one gets a professional who doesn't skimp and does things right, but this is probably the case in half or less the cases out there, unfortunately. Regardless of the sealant used, the fact that the underside of stone is porous remains, and the fact that gravity is working against you every time you weight up the sink remains. And the fact that every time you fill a sink with hot water there is a differential in thermal expansion between the sink and the stone planes remains (which is why pure silicone is the only suggested sealant for undermount sink seals, as it stretches over the planes moving better than other sealants). The numerous gizmos being sold to hold up sinks itself should suggest to folks there is a reason WHY there are so many products being hawked to make a sink suspension "fail proof." This post was edited by beautybutdebtfree on Tue, Apr 22, 14 at 21:12

My wife and I are trying to have a child so hopefully soon on for both. I'm looking to remove wallpaper and repaint. I know that will involve sanding. It already involved that in 2 of the bedrooms that we had done when we moved in. They most certainly didn't worry about lead and even cut into the drywall to remove mold near the windowsill. But those rooms, as well as our 3rd bedroom, all tested -0.2 to 0.2. The calibration was -0.1 to 0.1 so I can see that the bedrooms are likely at zero lead and it makes me feel better about how painters we had handled the rooms and how I can handle doing the 3rd bedroom myself. The bathroom, which also has wallpaper (and some glossy paint on wanescoting), also tested 0.2 and under so that seems safe to do as well. Still do wonder about the appropriate prep precautions. The one hallway wall that had those various results, one as high as 0.7, we are leaving alone for now. Just not worth dealing with and it's not ugly wallpaper. Still, I want to hang pictures and have drilled into it once before to secure furniture. But given the range of results: 0, 0.2, 0.4 and 0.7... and the fact that all of our walls otherwise tested basically 0... I'm thinking it was just within range of error for the XRF? I suppose I could cut into the wall to take / send a sample if concerned. Not sure why just one wall would have lead and nothing else? The door jamb makes sense. It was an old exterior door that had an additional built on to it. The one wall? Makes less sense. As one more point of reference. Our exterior paint tested 0.0 on our garage but 0.5 on the siding. It is definitely new paint and lead-free. So that shows me that some "higher" results can show up on lead-free surface. The biggest concern is the staircase. I haven't yet found anyone I trust to do it right now before my wife is pregnant. But I'd rather someone do it right and have my wife (and myself) live with her parents during that time that they do it. Then appropriately clean everything that could be impacted (i.e. get professional to clean the carpets and ensure they HEPA vacuum not just the staircase enclosure but also the basement below (might be good time to just clean the entire basement floor and re-pour the concrete). The other option is to either 1. do nothing or encapsulate myself without scraping. It isn't a high traffic staircase (being the attic) so even if the paint doesn't stick perfectly it's better than nothing. But really leaning towards getting this damn crappy lead-painted staircase out for good. Quotes I've had to tear down and rebuild were not much more than scrape/encapsulate professionally. Sorry for the long rant!

Never heard of that code (distance from toilet to vanity) but what we are proposing is actually giving more room. We are moving the vanity away from the toilet about 1 inch. That is the most we can due to the plumbing. It's not a tight space around the toilet. I've used it myself many times. The wall cabinet was put up and left by a tenant and we will probably just leave it. We took out the medicine cabinet and will put up a large mirror. We will fill any little gaps with the cabinet with trim and extend the counter.