Plenty of the housing stock in downtown Loveland, central Boulder, and the older streets around Estes Park predates 1978. That year matters, because it is when the United States banned lead in consumer house paint. Anything painted before then may have lead underneath, sometimes buried beneath four or five later coats.
The paint sitting undisturbed on your wall is not the problem. Sanding it, scraping it, or heat-stripping it is, because that is what turns a stable coating into dust you can breathe.
The Rule That Applies to Your Repaint
The EPA’s Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule, usually shortened to RRP, covers contractors who disturb painted surfaces in homes and child-occupied facilities built before 1978. It has been in force since April 2010.
Under RRP, a firm doing that work must be EPA-certified, and the crew has to include a certified renovator who has completed the accredited training. The rule also requires the contractor to give you the EPA pamphlet “Renovate Right” before work begins, and to keep records of the containment and cleanup for three years.
There is a genuine exemption worth knowing: if the job disturbs less than six square feet of interior painted surface per room, or less than twenty square feet outside, RRP does not apply. Most full repaints blow past both thresholds during prep, so the exemption rarely helps on the kind of project homeowners are actually calling about.
Colorado adds its own layer. The state runs a lead-based paint program through the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, so a contractor working here needs to satisfy state requirements alongside the federal ones.
What Compliant Work Actually Looks Like
You can tell whether a crew is following the rule by watching the first hour.
Plastic sheeting goes down and gets taped to the walls, not just laid on the floor. Interior work areas get sealed off, with HVAC vents covered so dust does not travel through the ductwork into the rest of the house. Outside, sheeting extends about ten feet from the wall and further if the work is above ground level, with the edges weighted or staked.
Nobody should be open-flame burning or using a heat gun above 1,100 degrees. Power sanding and grinding are allowed only with a HEPA-filtered shroud attached to the tool. Dry scraping into open air is exactly the wrong approach, and it is still the most common violation on residential jobs.
Cleanup uses a HEPA vacuum and wet methods, and the plastic gets folded inward so the dust stays trapped on the way out. On interior jobs the certified renovator performs a cleaning verification at the end, wiping surfaces with a damp disposable cloth and comparing it against an EPA verification card.
Testing First Is Often the Cheaper Path
A contractor can skip the full RRP work practices if testing shows the components in question are lead-free. A certified renovator can run recognized test kits on site, or you can hire a certified lead inspector or risk assessor for a more thorough evaluation.
On a house with several additions from different decades, testing frequently comes back mixed: original 1940s trim positive, 1990s addition clean. That result lets a crew contain only the rooms that need it and work normally elsewhere, which usually costs less than treating the whole house as suspect.
Skip the guesswork about paint colors and layer counts. Age of the component is the only reliable signal, and even that only tells you to test.
Why Exteriors Deserve Extra Attention Here
Exterior prep on a Front Range house involves a lot of scraping, and old lead paint chips end up in the soil around the foundation where they stay. That soil is where children and pets spend time.
This is one of several reasons we treat exterior prep as the part of the job that determines everything downstream. If you are already dealing with failing coatings, our guide to peeling exterior paint walks through why the failure happened, which matters before anyone starts removing material.
Ground containment is not optional on a pre-1978 exterior. The sheeting is there to catch chips and dust so they can be collected rather than raked into the lawn.
Questions Worth Asking Before You Hire
Ask whether the firm holds current EPA RRP certification, and ask to see the certificate rather than taking the answer on faith. Ask who the certified renovator on your specific job will be, since certification attaches to a named person on site, not to the company sign.
Then ask how they plan to handle containment on your house, and listen for whether the answer includes specifics about your layout. Ask what happens to the debris.
Any contractor who tells you lead is not a concern on a 1955 house, without testing anything, has told you what you need to know.
The Part Nobody Enjoys
Compliant work costs more. Containment takes time to build, HEPA equipment is slower than a belt sander, and the cleanup and verification add hours at the end of every day. A bid that follows RRP on an older home will lose to a bid that ignores it, every time, on price alone.
That gap is worth understanding when you compare quotes on an older property, and it is one of the specific cases where the low bid is low for a reason you would not accept if it were written down. Our guide on reading a painting estimate covers how to make bids comparable before you judge them on total.
Peak Painting works on homes across Loveland, Boulder, and Estes Park, including plenty built well before 1978. Call 720-849-7654 for a free written estimate and we will walk through how your house should be handled.
This guide describes federal and Colorado regulatory requirements in general terms and is not legal advice. For the current text of the RRP Rule and homeowner resources, see the EPA’s lead program at epa.gov/lead, and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment for state requirements.