Before signing on the dotted line, make sure your dream property isn’t hiding toxic dangers like lead paint, mold growth, or asbestos insulation.

Despite persistently high mortgage interest rates, most insiders expect home prices to increase significantly in 2025. Therefore, instead of upscaling, many families are seriously considering renovating or updating their current homes. This option may be more cost-effective, but it’s also more dangerous. 

Most existing homes were built before 1980. As a result, health hazards often lurk inside the walls. These hazards include lead pipes, mold, and asbestos insulation.

When people buy houses, they’re usually aware of these hazards, due to seller disclosure laws. But when owners renovate homes, they often don’t know about these hazards until workers stumble over them and unintentionally expose themselves, and others, to danger.

Owners could be legally responsible for such exposure and the severe illnesses they cause. More importantly, owners are morally responsible for such damages. This post discusses the hazards and some ways to avoid them.

Lead Pipes

The ancient Romans may have been the first people to extensively use lead plumbing. This metal is very durable yet very easy to bend and shape. Lead is also one of the most corrosion-resistant metals, an important quality for plumbing. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, lead was cheap and readily available in great quantities.

The Dangers of Lead Contamination

Much like asbestos (more on that below), these qualities prompted builders to overlook the health risks of lead exposure, which include:

  • Lower IQ,
  • Damage to the brain and nervous system,
  • Learning and behavioral difficulties,
  • Slowed growth,
  • Hearing problems, and
  • Headaches.

These issues usually affect children who are exposed to lead pipes and paint. Adults are not immune to its ill health effects. Symptoms of lead poisoning in adults include:

  • Reproductive problems (in both men and women),
  • High blood pressure and hypertension,
  • Nerve disorders,
  • Memory and concentration problems, and
  • Muscle and joint pain.

Usually, these health effects occur when adults or children ingest lead, either directly or indirectly. Indirect lead poisoning usually occurs by drinking water tainted with lead. 

Lead Poisoning in Flint, Michigan

Flint, Michigan is one of the most recent examples of widespread lead poisoning. Around 2010, city officials changed the drinking water source from distant Lake Huron to the more accessible Flint River. That decision seemed sensible. But the pipes weren’t properly treated to prevent corrosion. 

The city quickly reversed course and drew drinking water from Lake Huron, but not before some ten thousand children were exposed to toxic levels of lead. Prosecutors filed criminal charges against several high-ranking city officials who were criminally negligent during the change-over process.

Because no one wants another Flint, in the wake of this disaster, most federal and state lead disposal rules tightened up significantly.

When owners renovate their homes, they usually don’t have to worry about lead poisoning. But if workers uncover lead pipes, and they probably will, this hazardous metal must be properly disposed of. The enhanced removal and disposal methods that the law requires usually raises the cost of the renovation or other project. The extra expense is an unwelcome surprise for many property owners.

Much like asbestos, lead was commonly used in residential structures built before 1980. So, if your home was built before 1980, assume that workers will uncover lead pipes, and budget accordingly.

Mold

Thisfungus is extremely common in humid or wet environments, a description that applies to most of the country. Most experts agree that, although it’s nasty, mold isn’t harmful, unless the exposed person has a pre-existing condition, such as:

  • A mold allergy,
  • COPD, or
  • A compromised immune system.

Additionally, people who are exposed to large quantities of mold, such as renovation workers who are in a previously-flooded basement, often develop respiratory symptoms like dyspnea (shortness of breath), nasal congestion, wheezing, and coughing. 

The Uncertain Health Effects of Mold

However, there’s little or no evidence that mold causes serious or life-threatening conditions, such as infantile acute idiopathic pulmonary hemorrhage (AIPH), nosebleeds, or memory loss.

Although mold exposure symptoms aren’t serious, these victims could easily file civil claims and obtain a modest amount of compensation. Most homeowners insurance companies use these judgements as a pretext to change the policy risk factors and drastically increase rates. Furthermore, if workers get sick at a jobsite, word gets around, and that jobsite is at least informally blacklisted.

So, owners should always assume that their homes are infected with mold and require workers to take appropriate respiratory precautions, like facemasks.

Asbestos

The risks of lead and mold are significant, but they pale in comparison with the risk of asbestos exposure, which has both serious healthcare and legal ramifications.

Asbestos is much more toxic than lead. As a result, the health effects of asbestos exposure are much worse. These effects include:

  • Mesothelioma: One of the rarest and most aggressive kinds of lung cancer is also one of the most difficult kinds of this illness to diagnose and treat. SInce mesothelioma’s latency period usually exceeds fifty years, most exposure victims don’t know they’re sick until their illness reaches crisis proportions. 
  • Asbestosis: This serious lung disease also has a lengthy latency period. After toxic asbestos fibers sear the insides of narrow breathing passageways, the resulting scar tissue blocks them. As a result, these victims have constant trouble breathing, even while at rest. Without radical treatment, like a complete lung transplant, they literally suffocate.
  • Pleural Thickening: Asbestos fibers also cause inflammation, specifically in the pleural membrane layer that surrounds the lungs. Unlike mesothelioma and asbestosis, pleural thickening isn’t always serious. But in extreme cases, the inflamed membranes almost literally crush the lungs.

Legally, a lack of knowledge, which could be a defense in mold and lead contamination matters, usually is not a defense in asbestos poisoning matters. Therefore, homeowners could easily be liable for damages. 

Asbestos is much more dangerous than lead or mold. Like mold, the fibers are easily inhaled. But unlike mold, asbestos has been conclusively linked to the above illnesses. So, before they renovate their homes, homeowners should partner with a professional contractor who locates, removes, and disposes of asbestos. The liability and health risks are far too large to leave to chance.