Power Washing in Burke, VA

Cedar and board-and-batten on these houses is usually on the gable ends and the sided chimney chase, which means the dirtiest wood is the hardest to reach. A chase on a three-story elevation is often thirty-five feet up with a sloped, planted bed at the bottom of the ladder.

Height is where people get hurt and where siding gets damaged, because a wand held overhead at full stretch cannot be controlled, and anything angled upward goes straight under a batten or a lap. We reach those walls with a low-pressure applicator and a telescoping rinse from a stable position, or we stage properly, and we accept that the top of a chase takes longer than the rest of the house.

Bare cedar is the other reason to keep pressure off. Weathered softwood furrows under a tip, and wand marks on a gable are permanent.

The Conservancy trail system runs behind a great many of these yards, and the wood fence between the two is the surface that gets worst fastest.

• The trail side is the green side. It faces tree cover and gets no sun and no airflow, so algae is heavier there than on the side you see from your kitchen.
• The bottom rail and the posts. Leaf pack piles against a fence on the woods side and keeps it wet year round. That is where boards go soft, and soft boards do not get washed.
• Access. Reaching the far side often means standing on common land. We keep gear off the trail itself and out of the way of people walking it.
• Both sides or neither. Cleaning one face of a board fence makes the other face look worse than it did.

Sheds, playsets and pergolas are the same wood in the same shade and are quick to add while we are already there.

A Burke Centre townhouse commonly parks in a cluster lot with a common walkway to the door and no private drive at all. That changes the logistics of a wash more than it changes the washing.

The nearest spigot may be at the back of the unit while the work is at the front, so the hose runs around or through. We lay it flat, flag it where it crosses a walkway, and keep the machine out of a travel lane so nobody comes home to a blocked space. On a middle unit we cover and rinse the neighbors' patios and siding on both sides as a matter of course, since the run of wall is continuous and water does not stop at a property line you cannot see.

On the single-family streets it is simpler: a real driveway, an apron and often a garage floor worth doing with a degreaser in the same visit.

Burke houses sit on grade that falls away from the road, so the patio is frequently at the lowest point of the lot with a walkout door or a lower-level slider right behind it.

Washing a slab in that position means pushing a large volume of water toward the only door in the house that sits below grade. We look at where the slab pitches before we start, work away from the threshold, and if the patio pitches back at the house we tell you, because that is why the bottom of the frame keeps rotting and no cleaning changes it. Area drains in these patios are usually full of leaf pack and need clearing first or the water has nowhere to go.

Landscape timbers and block walls holding the grade above a patio get chemistry and low pressure. Old timbers will shed material under a tip and that is not worth doing for a cleaner look.

Honest limits first.

• Swollen hardboard. Water will not firm it back up. A soft bottom course wants cutting out, and washing it beforehand only tells you how far the damage runs.
• Delaminated T1-11. Same answer. Once the plies have opened, getting it clean and wet is the opposite of helpful.
• Chalky aluminum. The powder rinses away and the panel still looks dull, because the finish on it is worn out rather than dirty.
• The green coming back. Under this much canopy it will, eventually. Killing the growth with chemistry rather than knocking it off with force is what makes the difference between two summers and two months.

Most people here are gone before we arrive and back after we pack up, which suits a wash fine. We work from a key or a code, leave the site tidy, and the same crew is at your house each day. Fredy Vargas looks at the property himself before pricing it. Virginia contractor license 2705098145, licensed, bonded and insured. Call 703-869-0593.