I had a friend long ago in my off-campus student housing days who fell victim to a notorious landlord spin. He’d signed the lease on a place the landlord had boasted he had “just finished painting and priming walls” for. On the one visit he’d been on, the land lord had spent a lot of time on the deck, explaining to his prospective tenant the boons of a good wood conditioner and the virtues of investigating the best way to hide water stains. My friend, taken with the deck’s beauty and under the impression that this guy knew what he was talking about, moved in happily…only to break his lease expensively a mere three weeks later due to the debilitating side effects of polyurethane fumes he was experiencing. Turns out, despite being able to rattle off a lot of jargon about construction, the land lord had failed to use a low odor paint that was low in VOCs, or “volatile organic compounds.”
According to a a recent industry report, paint with VOC levels above around 500 ppb can cause rea Continue reading “The Little Known Hazard of Renting or Renovating you Should be Paying Attention to”