Soft wash or pressure: which one the house actually needs

Pressure is a tool. It is not a personality. Most of the houses we are hired to save were hurt by the wrong one.

Pressure washing has a job: concrete, some brick, equipment, and flatwork that was poured to take it. Soft washing has a different job: killing the growth on siding, roofs, painted wood, and stucco, then rinsing it away without cutting the surface.

If you can see wand marks — lighter curves on a driveway, fuzzed wood, paint edges lifted — the last wash used pressure as a substitute for chemistry. Organic mildew does not ‘blast off’ in a lasting way. It is a living film. Kill it, or it returns with the next humid month, which in Troup and Harris Counties is most of them.

A useful rule on our jobs: if the surface was finished by a person (paint, stain, shingle granules, stucco texture), we start soft. If it was poured or laid to be walked on, we may use a surface cleaner after a pretreatment. The walk at the start of the job is not ceremony. It is the difference between a house that looks kept and a house that looks washed.

When you send photos, send the worst wall and a shot of the material up close. We would rather tell you a soft wash is the whole visit than discover painted brick under a nozzle.