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Friends: I have picked up a new hobby. A passion project, if you will. The hobby is obliterating dirt and grime from various surfaces with water from a magic wand. Literally, it’s called a wand and it’s part of my new pressure washer!
Carrying on with the theme of trying to make the front of my house look presentable while it awaits restoration and I wrap up the huge restoration of the side of the house, I focused a little attention on the front porch!
From a distance, the porch looks…pretty OK?It appears to be mostly original, and the fact that it’s still there at all is the main bright spot. It’s going to need a ton of work eventually—everything from the cornice (which may or may not need to be at least partially rebuilt—the rot is bad), to the siding, to those gloriously large 6-over-9 windows, to the door, to the transom, to the floor, to the columns. Literally all of it! I used to think I’d tackle the whole front elevation of the house at once, but now I’m thinking restoring the porch may well take an entire summer to get right. Isn’t that center column crazy looking?
I think that’s what happens when a contractor temporarily supports the roof and removes the original columns to install a new floor (the original floor was almost definitely tongue-and-groove fir, not 5/4″x6″ pressure-treated pine decking!), and then doesn’t understand that the columns are tapered when he throws a level on the side of the original column to put it back. I’m presuming this contractor was male, because only a guy would be this dense. The column is tapered, genius! You’re doing it all wrong! It’s only super noticeable when you look at the porch head-on, but of course it makes me mad whenever I think about it. Poor beautiful house. Who hurt you like this?
IN ANY EVENT. I sweep the porch sometimes. That’s about it. To be honest it’s not like the porch is in constant use—looking out onto the street isn’t the most bucolic view in the world, but I do like to sit out there on warm days with a cup of coffee or a cocktail and my laptop, getting some work done and watching the world go by until I get bored of the world and want to go inside. Sadly over time I’ve definitely used the porch less, not more, which I didn’t think about much until I realized the reason for that is pretty simple.
OK fine I’ll show you.
Please be kind.
I’m sorry in advance.
GASP! I FEEL LIKE A MONSTER! Yes, for real: that’s how the vinyl siding under the porch looked until a few days ago. No, it hasn’t always been that bad. No, I have not doctored this photo for dramatic effect. Yes, I have completely neglected to touch it in five years because if I’m not actively renovating it, what is the point of doing even some light maintenance?
The point is this: restoring a house takes a long time, and in that time you constantly have to negotiate between quick and achievable solutions and long-term, more comprehensive work. Focusing only on the latter means that you’re ignoring the former (guilty!), and so everything starts to actually look way worse than it really is. When I look at things like this, my instinct is to just rip all the vinyl off the wall—can of worms be damned! But then I have to reign it in and remember that I will tackle that project someday, but not today. Today, I just need it to…not be disgusting. And if I’ve learned anything through working on the inside of houses, it’s that a good cleaning is the cheapest and fastest kind of makeover.
Just to cut myself a little slack, the whole house doesn’t look like this, I swear!!! The rest of the vinyl siding at least gets washed down a little when it rains, but these walls under the porch never get rained on, so all that road dirt and pollen and other dirt just kind of accumulates. Let’s try not to think too hard about what this may or may not suggest about my local air quality, seeing as I’d rather just keep living my life than figure out how to insert myself into a plastic bubble.
So. I described my gross situation to my fairy godparents at Lowe’s and asked if I could pretty-please have my very own pressure washer, and they obliged! #2blessed
As I have recently discussed, I have a deep and abiding aversion to equipment that needs gas or oil to work. Whether it’s a lawnmower or a weed whacker or a snow blower, in my mind they are all equally as complicated as an automobile or a fighter jet and I wouldn’t mess around with the innards of those either. I’ve had my car for like 4 years and only recently learned how to pop the hood…while I let the AAA guy replace my battery, which I’d sooner throw into the Hudson River than attempt to jump by myself. Way too risky. Are you nuts? I’ll stick to house stuff PLEASE AND THANK YOU and I just want my tools to work immediately and without hassle and this doesn’t seem like too much to ask out of life.
So anyway! My pressure washer is by Stanley, and it’s a plug-in model! And when you go to turn it on, it does so immediately and without hassle! It’s everything I ever wanted! Unfortunately it’s currently out of stock, but I got the inside scoop and they’re working on restocking them AS I TYPE THIS VERY SENTENCE so all is not lost. There are a bunch of electric pressure washers available, though, including this Greenworks one that’s evidently equally powerful, a little cheaper, and looks much more compact! Why didn’t I just get that one? NOT SURE. I felt like branching out into yellow machines. Like most new tools I buy, I generally don’t need the biggest, baddest, most powerful one out there, but I also don’t want the cheapest one because that often results in disappointment (and needing to replace it sooner). My Stanley machine lands in the middle/upper-end of available options, and seems more than sufficient to do the things I want it to do!
ANYWAY, back to my very disgusting siding. My basic strategy was to start up at the top of the wall and work my way down, concentrating on each horizontal run of siding on my way down. It took a few minutes to kind of get comfortable with it, and then it was ALL I WANTED TO DO for the rest of the day. I mean how satisfying, right? Included with the machine were a few different interchangeable nozzles for the end of the wand, which are helpful for different kinds of cleaning projects.
After giving everything a first pass, which maybe took about 20 minutes, things were looking about a thousand times better! DEFINITELY way more than a hose alone could have done, and way faster and less hassle than trying to do this by hand with a sponge and some rags which was my previous plan I’d been putting off forever.
Not all pressure washers have them, but one of the things I like about mine is that it has a separate chamber for detergent if you need something with more cleaning power than just pressurized water. It uses about 1 part of cleaner for every 10 parts of water, so concentrated cleaners that aren’t too gel-like work well. After I got most of the grime off, I filled the detergent compartment with regular white vinegar and went back for a second pass, figuring it couldn’t hurt and might help lighten some of the deeper staining. Lowe’s also sells a full line of cleaners for different applications—next time I want to add the Krud Kutter House and Siding Cleaner and see how that does! The regular Krud Kutter has become one of my indispensable cleaning products around the house, so I’m optimistic.
SO. TO REVIEW. BEFORE:
LIKE LITERALLY AN HOUR LATER:
I thought it would be cute to switch the coffee out for a cocktail and add a festive little lantern. This backfired because a) you can’t tell that the stupid candle is lit and b) my friend dropped by while this very profesh photoshoot was going on and I had to explain that I was not, in fact, fixing a cocktail to drink at 1 in the afternoon but rather to just take pictures of for the Internet, which I realized as it came out of my mouth just might actually be more embarrassing.
I TRY. But the point here is not my lackluster prop styling. The point here is my now positively LUMINOUS walls of vinyl siding that no longer look like they’ve been left to steep in a swamp for years on end.
It looks SO much better. One thing I didn’t totally know about vinyl siding is the extent to which it really does stain—you’d think plastic wouldn’t but it totally does. Most of the nastiness was surface dirt and staining, but even blasting at the highest pressure couldn’t get the deeper staining out. So it didn’t exactly achieve “it looks brand new!” kinds of results, but I blame the old vinyl (and MAYBE a certain someone’s years of deferred maintenance), not the washer. But this kind of improvement for a very little amount of work? I’LL TAKE IT! In fact, I really think this is a chore I can add to my seasonal to-do lists and do again a couple times a year to maintain it, and I know having my very own pressure washer will come in handy for ALL SORTS of things. I’m already giving my fence, garage and sidewalks side-eye. Also the street. Also my neighbors houses. What if I just start rogue pressure-washing things in the dead of night? Like I know I probably shouldn’t but just…WHAT IF? Watch out, world.
Fall Checklist: Pressure Washing Away The Grime! published first on
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