Hair stylists. I love mine. And, besides attending to the coifs of many Austinites, he is pretty handy himself. We swap house project stories when I'm in his chair getting cut and colored. He is currently creating his new salon and is doing a lot of the work himself. I love a guy that can make my hair look fantastic one minute and rip out a wall the next. When I told him (while my head was in the shampoo sink) that the outside of our house was looking a little grungy he mentioned that he owns a powerwasher and kindly offered to lend it to us. We had been thinking of powerwashing the house exterior for awhile but just never got around to renting the machine to do it. No more excuses. A couple of days ago we picked up Randy's powerwasher at his salon.
Here is the Honda 6.0 HP/3000 PSI/2.5 GPH PowerWasher.
It's really easy to use. Attach your regular old garden hose, attach the sprayer wand, add a little gasoline, fire it up just like you would a power lawn mower, and look out. It could literally rip your face off.
Dan tackled the back and one side of the house in pretty good time...maybe a total of 4 hours. He came in soaking wet because when washing the eaves the water pours down right on top of you. No way around that. But the back and side of the house, and the little patio thing in back, look sparkling and bright. Years of grime and gunk gone. What a difference!
Then yesterday it was my turn. I tackled the porch, front and other side of the house. And the limestone flower beds. And some windows. And some screens. And the driveway. I was warned that once you start powerwashing you will want to powerwash everything. It's true.
Here are some pictures of yesterdays session. As you can seen there is a lot of streaky dirt on our vinyl siding. We are not huge fans of vinyl siding but that's what came with the house and for now is ok.
As you can see, our house is really white under all that dirt.
And here you can see that powerwashing can make a huge difference...check out the color of this limestone before and after!
And the porch.
Black wrought iron swirly porch things before:
And after: Powerwashing is kind of like sand blasting.
The old paint on all these old windows is cracking and peeling. We are in the process of sanding and prepping them and will repaint them black eventually, but this powerwasher helped quite a lot with paint removal! Less work for us!
Windows before:
And after.
Here is a picture of the driveway. It needs new blacktop stuff on it but it sure is clean now.
Here is our porch ceiling. On our May road trip we went to New Orleans and took a little walking tour of the Garden District, and I noticed that most of the porch ceilings on the amazing old houses were painted sky blue. Must be a Southern thing. Now that it's really clean I decided we need to paint our porch ceiling sky blue, too. Another project to add to the list.
And here is the front of our house after the powerwashing session is done. Looks really crisp and clean.
This was not a bad way to pass a hot June day because I was soaking wet the whole time. Powerwashing works, and is actually kind of fun to do. Glad we finally got this done.
Cat update: This guy is doing great, and getting bigger. And he finally picked a name. He calls himself Otis.
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