Most homeowners hire a painter for color. If your house predates 1978, you are actually hiring for something less visible: whether the crew knows how to remove old paint without spreading lead dust through your yard, your soil, and your children's bedrooms.

Federal law recognizes that gap. The EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting (RRP) Rule requires that any firm paid to disturb painted surfaces in a pre-1978 home, child care facility, or school be certified, use trained renovators, and follow specific lead-safe work practices. It is not a badge a contractor buys — it is a certification with training, recordkeeping, and enforcement behind it.

Ace of Diamonds Painting has held that certification since 2017 (firm certification NAT-F228701-1). Below is what it changes about how we work on the older housing stock across Longmont, Boulder County, Berthoud and Fort Collins.

Why this matters in Northern Colorado specifically

This is not a coastal-city problem. A large share of the homes we paint were built well before the ban:

• Longmont — Old Town, the Historic Eastside and the West Side blocks are dense with 1900s–1950s frame houses on original wood siding and trim.
• Boulder — Mapleton Hill, Whittier, University Hill and Newlands carry many layers of paint from decades of repainting.
• Louisville and Lafayette — the old coal-town cores near Main Street and Public Road are almost entirely pre-war.
• Berthoud — the downtown grid and the surrounding farmhouses, plus outbuildings that rarely get proper prep.
• Fort Collins — Old Town, the Laurel School district and Buckingham/Andersonville hold some of the oldest housing on the Front Range.
• Niwot and Gunbarrel — the original Niwot townsite along 2nd Avenue is late-1800s, and Gunbarrel's earliest ranch homes predate the ban.
• Brighton — the blocks around Main Street and Bridge Street are full of early-1900s brick and frame houses.
• Frederick and the Carbon Valley — another old coal town; the historic core near Fifth Street is well inside the pre-1978 range.
• Erie — mostly newer construction, but Old Town Erie sits squarely in the pre-1978 range.

Add high-altitude sun, hail, and dry freeze-thaw cycles, and these houses need aggressive prep — scraping, sanding, feathering. That is precisely the work that generates lead dust when it is done wrong.

Our lead-safe process, step by step

Every pre-1978 project follows the same sequence. Nothing here is optional, and nothing here is a shortcut we take when the schedule tightens.

See the work

A look at how our crews approach an exterior — prep first, paint last.

Before and after

A 1940s cottage where the original paint had let go down to bare wood. Scraped, primed and finished the lead-safe way — and it will hold, because the surface underneath was sound before a finish coat went on.

Before

After

What to ask before anyone touches your paint

If you take one thing from this page, take these four questions. Ask them of us, and ask them of every other bid you collect.

1. Are you an EPA Lead-Safe Certified firm, and can I see the certificate? Firm certification and individual renovator training are two different documents. A compliant contractor has both.
2. Did you give me the "Renovate Right" pamphlet? Certified firms are required to deliver EPA-approved lead hazard information before work begins, and to keep proof of it.
3. How will you contain the work area? The answer should involve plastic sheeting, ground cover, signage and a plan for wind — not a tarp and good intentions.
4. How do you clean up and verify? HEPA vacuums, wet wiping and a documented cleaning verification — not a leaf blower.

A contractor who cannot answer these is either uncertified or planning to cut the corner. Both cost you more than the bid difference.

Why lead-safe prep is also a better paint job

Homeowners sometimes hear "lead-safe" and assume it is bureaucratic overhead — a cost with no benefit to the finished product. It is the opposite. The RRP practices force the discipline that makes an exterior last: paint gets removed back to a sound surface instead of being coated over, edges get feathered so the new film has something to grip, and the site gets cleaned so dust and chips are not trapped under fresh paint.

On an older home in this climate, prep is the entire warranty. That is why we back our work with a warranty of up to seven years — we can only do that because of how the surface is handled before anyone opens a can.

Before

After

The same turn-of-the-century farmhouse. Chalked, tired paint taken back to a sound surface, then finished — the trim lines are crisp because the substrate was prepped, not just coated.

Frequently asked