Painted over the sigils in the basement. Should I be worried?
So I spent last weekend painting the basement. Primer + two coats, really cleaned the place up. My wife pointed out today that there were some markings on the east wall that are now covered. I figured they were from a previous owner's kids? Looked like someone drew them in marker. Sort of circular patterns with lines through them, maybe 4-5 of them spread across the wall. Some were behind the water heater so I had to really get in there to cover them. Is this a thing I should not have done?
What color were they. I need you to think carefully. Were they black, red, or a color you couldn't quite identify?
Two were definitely black. One was kind of a dark greenish? The ones behind the water heater were hard to see, I didn't really look at them closely. One of those might have been red. Why.
OK. The black ones are probably standard containment notation from when the house was built. Those are fine, cosmetic at this point, won't affect anything. The green one is unusual but probably a later addition by a previous owner. Home remedy stuff, not regulated. The red one you need to uncover. Get a scraper, find it, and see if it's intact under the paint. If it IS intact, take a photo and post it here. If it's NOT intact, call a licensed threshold maintenance company. Not a general contractor. Not a handyman. Licensed threshold maintenance. Don't wait on this.
Spent an hour behind the water heater with a scraper. Found the red one. It's intact under the paint. Primer didn't damage it at all, which is either reassuring or concerning, since the primer damaged literally everything else it touched, including a section of the floor I dripped on. Posting a photo. It's a circle with what looks like a seven-pointed star inside it and some writing along the outer edge that I can't read. The writing isn't in any alphabet I recognize. The whole thing is about eight inches across.
Seven-pointed, not five? Count again.
Seven. I counted three times.
OK. Seven is fine. Seven is residential grade. That's a standard threshold stability seal, installed by whoever built the house or did foundation work. The red ink is because it's the active one. The black ones are backups. You can paint over it again if you want, it clearly doesn't affect functionality, but I'd recommend using a clear coat so the seal stays visible for future inspections. Any licensed threshold maintenance company will want to see it during a resale inspection and they'll be annoyed if they have to scrape. If it had been five-pointed, that would have been a different conversation and we would be having it faster.