It takes more than getting rid of the coal-burning furnace and putting up some solar panels to make an old home into a model of sustainability. You also have to get rid of a lot of toxic waste. Our home hit the trifecta: a leaky oil tank that had contaminated yards of subsoil in the backyard, German siding covered in years of lead paint, and a bunch of asbestos wrapped around the pipes of the old boiler/radiator system. But hey, it was cheap!
The tank and soil we had to take care of before we even bought the house a little over three years ago. This involved the usual large earth-moving equipment, looking all the more giant and dinosaurish in the confines of a small backyard. Fifteen yards had to go the from being part of our backyard to part of some trash mountain just across the border in Virginia. It's not entirely clear to us that was the right thing to do, but many pieces of paper ensured us this was the only option. Showing pictures of myself innoculating our backyard with oyster mushroom spawn apparently wasn't going to convince the folks down at city hall (and the mortgage company) that mycelium had eated our toxic waste and turned our yard into a pristine inner-city haven. So the soil had to go. My apologies to southern Virginia. Just to be safe, I threw some oyster mushroom spawn in the new subsoil they brought.
The new project is the lead paint. We're not ones to worry too much what our neighbors think of the general appearance of our spread, but when we almost wiped out a schoolbus of children when a sheet of lead paint cascaded off our home early one morning, we figured it was probably time to do something. The joke here is that our home was painted just four years ago, or right before it went on the market. Our neighbor tells us they powerwashed and painted the whole thing in one day. Not bad for a 2,500 ft2 duplex! I guess a one-day paint job shouldn't be expected to last more than three years, but calling it a paint job doesn't sound right. A spray job is probably more like it.
So what to do? Well, from what I can tell there are two options. There's the planing option, and there's the infrared heat gun option. I mean if you're going to go to the trouble, you might as well step up to the plate and get all that crap off your home, out of your plants, and buried deep underground somewhere. They both have their pros and cons, but both appear to be quite effective. The planing is quicker and ultimately uses less energy, I would guess. It's limited to flat surfaces, which is a very big limitation, and can't access corners. The heat gun is tedious and slow, many would say mind-wrenchingly so. We would agree, which is why we hired someone else to do it. Watching it come off square foot by square foot is a marvelous feeling, though, like taking a bath after being dirty for eighty years. And a great reminder that it would really be a nice thing if we could figure out how to develop some forethought as a civilization, and try to figure out if things are toxic before we cover our houses with it, or our backyards, or our basements.
What goes on top? For us, we're gonna try out some organic linseed oil based paint. The linseed oil, a natural wood preservative (also called the flax plant), is the primer. Then a geologically-based paint that can withstand the elements is applied. Every 5-10 years you apply another coat of linseed oil, and the theory is you can do this forever, assuming, of course, that you are alive and still like the color. They say it will last at least 50 years! Will it? Check this space in the year 2060 and we'll let you know!
