Suspected Lead Paint

you can get lead paint test swabs on amazon easily enough - used to be something that was commonly stocked in DIY stores but seemingly not so much now for some reason

now worry I've exposed myself to lead.

If you're on the same vintage as most people on the forum you'l probablyl have inhaled more lead everyday on your walk to school and the risks are greater to children than adults.

Its funny to think we're all a few IQ points lower than we could have been - and yet look at youngsters getting straight As in their GCSEs and A Levels and moan that it must becuase the exams have gotten easier 🙂 Can't possibly becuase of the lead in the petrol, plumbing, toys and smeared all over the walls of our houses. Lolz

Oldish west yorkshire semi detached.

Doesnt even need to be that old property - lead paint was still being sold up to the early 1990s! Sale to DIYers was slowly phased out from the 1970s but it was still being sold to trade painters so it could quite often be the first coat of paint in a new build.

for alternatives to sanding the normal advice is to use a chemical stripper although modern less-toxic strippers struggle with some old school paints - if its old woodwork that has has numerous layers you can find strippers manages to lift some of the paint layers but not others and it can all end up and gruesome mess.

An alternative would be to scrape off whats actually loose and leave whats good then go over the lot with a Shellac based primer (Smith and Roger Blocade is a fave) which is a great problem-solving paint between old oil based paints and new water based ones - basically shellac sticks to anything and any paint sticks to shellac.

Shellac paints are alcohol based (using meths for clean up) and the great thing about them is they dry incredibly quickly (on a warm day you can feel the paint grabbing the bristles of the brush even) and although a bit meths-y smelling while you work the paint loses its paint-y smell very quickly too

So you could try - scrap off loose paint - prime with Blockade - then see how things look - you could fine fill over primer if the paint edges where you've scraped are showing and reprime if needed. Blockade sands well and becuase it dries so fast you can rework areas that need the extra attention without having to wait hours/days between applications

Then you can paint whatever top coat you like on - although I actually like blockade as a final finish  - has a nice soft sheen and doesn't have that very clinical white a lot of modern paints have

In a previous life, I worked with lead, including blending lead powders and evaporating molten lead in large quantities at 1500 deg C. I got a free pint of milk at afternoon tea break and I was required to drink it, so the calcium would compete with any inhaled or ingested lead. This was before Health and Safety, mind you!

A one-off exposure such as you might have had from the paint is unlikely to have lasting consequences but best avoid a repeat. 

Test strips as above. Test strips indicate the lead % as well.

You have to keep them in contact with the surface to be tested and that might be a few layers down.

I scraped the loose paint back to sound material and then tested that before going near the sandpaper. Take precautions before scraping and always wash your hands.

You can also cloak the wood with 6mm MDF. Prep prepped without going near the lead.

I've used both methods.

Sanding, heat, chemicals and scraping all have pros and cons 

Dont bother with the test strips/swabs the accuracy is awful. If you really wanted to know cut a credit card sized section of the paint down to the base material and submit to a lab like marchwood scientific in manchester, or find a local friendly historic building hazmat specialist with a liscence and a calibrated XRF  to do a full depth NDT on it( if you were local I'd pop in for you)  Control of lead at work regs give a nice simple flow chart, and even you have a leaded paint, it doesn't mean that exposure would reach a level of significance.. HSE and british coatings federation stance is to light prep and over paint unless its in really poor shape, other wise wet strip and paint. Do not thermally remove it unless its with an IR lamp as that makes it goopy for scraping without volatalising the lead as a fume.

So basically, don't panic, it's dead easy to deal with, with some basic precautionary measures and the body is very good a getting lead back out, so even if you had a minor exposure it would be out of you in no time, which is why lead workers used to have biological suspension limits, reach the limit, time off work until your body dumps some off, retest and back to work.