Lead Paint Found and Chipping - What are my next steps?
So my husband and I (and 2 small cats) bought this 1924 craftsman bungalow a few months ago. It has original doors that were painted white at some point.
The back of the our basement door had tracks to a pantry shelving system without shelves on it when we moved in (so it was unusable). Today I bought a new shelf system to use/hang on the door, so I had to remove the previous tracks. When I started to remove it, I noticed that the previous tracks were held in with Molly screws, and that there were several layers of older white paint on the door. Pulling out the Molly screws and tracks caused the multiple layers of paint to chip.
At that point, I got nervous and grabbed a lead testing kit I had bought when we moved in out of an abundance of caution and sure enough it turned to dark purple (aka lead “detected”) in seconds.
What im worried about is my cats can and will scratch at this door a lot when they want us to open it for them (if they hear me doing laundry downstairs or my husband working in his workshop they will demand to be let into the basement to be with us) and the door is also close to where their food bowl is.
I immediately put my cats outside on our sunporch with a new bowl and fresh food and closed the exterior door so they are separated from the paint and I wiped up all of the chips and put them into a ziplock baggy with the paper towels I used to clean them up.
Questions:
What should my next step be? I kind of want to remove the door and put it outside for now and get in touch with some sort of specialist on Monday. Is that over-reacting?
My original goal was to eventually do a DIY and strip the paint off of all of our doors and restore them back to the wood finish - is that a pipe dream down? Should I give up on that dream and paint over it again?
Or god forbid, should I just replace the door totally?