George Brown
By George Brown

“George, can you help me carry this in?” Yvonne was calling to me from the garage, as she often does when she returns from shopping at the Peppermint Pig. The “Pig”, as I refer to it, is but one of the dozen or so thrift stores Yvonne regularly visits within a 50 mile radius of our home. In addition to having above average merchandise for a thrift store, the Pig’s special appeal is its mission of rescuing cats and dogs.

I’m not complaining about Yvonne shopping at thrift stores. Over the years she has saved us a ton of money doing so. But every now and then a bargain turns out not to be a bargain, which brings me back to Yvonne calling me to the garage to carry her treasure from the Pig into the house. It was a charming little wrought iron table that, as Yvonne put it, “Only needs a quick coat of white spray paint.”

“I wish it were that simple”, I said as I examined the table. “It’s old, very old, and probably contaminated with lead paint.” This was not something I expected Yvonne to know, but prior to 1978, when the government banned the use of lead in paint, almost everything was coated with lead based paint, including cute little wrought iron tables.

“If Manly (our three month old puppy that we happen to have purchased at the Pig) chews on the table, he could ingest the lead paint and be poisoned by it, and have convulsions, and maybe even die”, I said matter-of-factly.

“Well, we will just have to remove the paint that’s on the table before we spray paint it”, Yvonne responded with the same matter-of-fact tone I had used. “We”, of course, meant me, and Yvonne has long been accustomed to my making up excuses to get out of any job, even removing paint from a little table.

“Okay”, I said, “but I’ll have to do it right, which is going to cost more than you might expect.”

Yvonne shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “Okay, do what you have to do, but do it.”

Having worked as a painter during my college years, I knew what I was getting into even if Yvonne didn’t. My first step was to purchase a lead paint test kit, available at most hardware stores – cost, $27.34.

Sure enough, the four coats of paint on the little wrought iron table were heavily contaminated with lead, and there was only one truly effective way to remove the paint. I would need a sandblaster – cost for a reliable home use unit, “$199.89. But you can’t just blast lead paint chips and dust into the air without contaminating everything in the garage, including my lungs, so for safety sake I purchased a respirator suitable for sandblasting – cost $555.27. I also needed a full body DuPont Tychem HazMat suit to keep the lead dust particles from covering my clothing and potentially being absorbed through the pores of my skin – cost $1,281.35. Maximum safety also required covering everything in the garage and sealing it tightly with duct tape – cost of materials, $487.65; plus I would need a steel hazardous materials disposal container to capture the lead dust from the sandblaster vacuum tube – cost $1,454.99. The blasting job was slow and maticulus and took three days, which required purchasing a small HazMat decontamination tent so I could safely enter the house each evening. Luckily, I was able to find a good used one on Ebay for $88.48.

Unfortunately, I had failed to take into account the cost to dispose of the lead dust particles captured in the steel container. As luck would have it, CECOS, the hazardous waste site near our home no longer accepts hazardous materials so I had to drive all the way to Oak Ridge, Tennessee where the material could be burned in the government’s nuclear materials incinerator, the very same one I learned that was used to dispose of a bed of Kryptonite rock found on a hillside near Smallville, Ohio in the fall of 1938 – disposal fee (including gas but not lodging because I stayed with friends in Knoxville), $1,057.

Having completed the safe removal and disposal of the lead paint, the little table was ready to paint. I went to the Owensville Dollar Store and purchased a $3.99 can of Rustoleum Bright White spray paint, placed the table on some newspaper in the yard, and applied two coats. The job was finally complete, and I must admit the $6 thrift store bargain (plus $5,155.96 for spray paint and miscellaneous expenses) turned out to be a fine looking little table. Most importantly, Manly P. Brown can now safely chew on the legs of the table to his little heart’s content without fear of being harmed.

By the way, because we purchased Manly at the Peppermint Pig, his middle initial stands for Pig. We didn’t have the heart to name him Manly P.P. Brown.

George Brown is a freelance writer. He lives in Jackson Township with his wife Yvonne.