American Osage Consulting

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Since our house was built before 1978, contractors must assume that the house contains lead paint. They must take special precautions to prevent creating and spreading hazardous dust, and they increase their charge by hundreds of dollars to cover the extra labor and materials. We thought it was unlikely that our house had much lead paint in it, so we decided to have it tested. I spoke to Patsy, a co-owner of American Osage, who explained what would be done in the inspection and gave me a price based on the size of the house. Al (a co-owner) and Kurt arrived right on time for the inspection. They took more than 130 readings of surfaces throughout the inside and outside of the house, using an X-ray fluorescense lead paint analyzer. At my request, they also took a sample of a ceiling tile from the basement and sent it to a lab to be tested for asbestos. The entire process took about 3 hours. Al and Kurt were professional and friendly and answered my questions about the testing. When a single lead-contaminated area was found, they took several extra readings there to confirm the results. They originally thought that they would have the report done in 3 days, but it took a few days longer because they wanted to include the results of the asbestos test. They sent us the report by e-mail. Even though this testing seems somewhat expensive, it saved us money in the long run because we can show the report to contractors in the future to avoid the charges for lead abatement.