Montgomery's heat and humidity grow mildew on everything that holds still. Getting it off without damaging what's underneath is mostly about chemistry and judgment — not about how hard you can push water.
Tell us what needs washing and roughly how big.
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Most people call us for one of two reasons. Either the house has gone green and dingy and they want it to look cared-for again, or they're having it painted and they know washing comes first. Those sound like the same job. They aren't, and the standard each one has to meet is different.
A standalone clean has to satisfy your eyes. Stand at the curb, look at the house, and it should look like a different property. A pre-paint wash has to satisfy the paint. It doesn't matter how clean the siding looks if there's still a fine layer of chalk on it, because paint will bond to that chalk instead of to the siding, and it will take the chalk with it when it lets go two years later.
So when we quote a wash, the first thing we want to know is what happens next. If nothing happens next, we're cleaning. If paint follows, we're doing prep that happens to leave the house clean, which is a higher bar and takes longer.
The name does the trade a disservice. The pressure at the nozzle is one variable among several, and it's usually the one that matters least and does the most damage when it's wrong.
What actually gets a house clean is the cleaning solution and how long it's allowed to sit there working. Mildew, algae and the black growth you see on north-facing walls are living organisms with roots into the surface. Water — at any pressure — knocks the top off them. It doesn't kill them. That's why a house that got blasted clean in the spring is spotted again by the end of summer: the visible growth was removed and the organism wasn't.
Killing it takes a proper cleaning solution, applied at low pressure, given time to dwell, and then rinsed. Done that way, the surface stays clean for far longer, and the water never has to be turned up high enough to hurt anything.
Washing damage is easy to cause and hard to undo, and most of it doesn't show up on the day. That's the trap. The house looks great when the truck leaves, and the consequences turn up weeks or months later, when nobody connects the two.
On that last point, there's a distinction worth making. If washing takes paint off your house, the wash didn't cause that. The paint was already failing and was being held on by habit. Better to find that out with a hose than to find out after you've paid to paint over it. What we won't do is discover it quietly and say nothing — if a wash starts pulling coating, we stop and show you, because it changes what the paint job needs to be.
Soft washing means low pressure and strong chemistry — roughly garden-hose force, with the cleaning solution doing the work and dwell time doing the rest. It's not a lesser service. On several surfaces it's the only acceptable method.
Asphalt shingle roofs are the clearest example. A pressure washer will strip the mineral granules off shingles, and those granules are the roof's UV protection and a large part of its remaining life. The black streaking on a roof is algae, and it comes off with chemistry alone. Anyone who offers to pressure wash your shingles is offering to shorten the life of your roof.
We also soft wash painted wood siding, vinyl, stucco, screens, and anything already showing its age.
Vinyl siding. Two different problems look similar from the driveway. Mildew is biological and washes off. Oxidation is the vinyl itself breaking down in UV, which leaves a chalky bloom that washing improves but cannot fully reverse. We'll tell you which one you have before we start, because the expectations are different. Vinyl also gets sprayed downward and across, never upward under the laps.
Brick and mortar. Brick tolerates cleaning well; the mortar between it often doesn't, particularly on older houses. We work at a pressure the joints can take rather than one the brick could take.
Stucco. Stucco is porous and frequently carries hairline cracks that are invisible until water is forced into them. Low pressure, and never held in one place. If washing reveals cracking or areas that sound hollow, that's a repair conversation before it's a painting conversation — see stucco painting.
Wood siding, decks and fences. Cleaned at a pressure that removes growth without raising the grain, then given real drying time. Timber that looks dry on the surface can still be wet inside the board, and nothing that gets applied over it will hold — that's covered in more detail on our deck staining page.
Concrete driveways and walks. Organic growth, oil and rust are three different stains and need three different treatments. Degreaser handles oil, and it has to be worked before rinsing. The most common complaint about a cheap driveway wash is patchiness, which happens when the cleaner isn't applied evenly across the whole slab — so half the concrete gets properly cleaned and the other half gets rinsed.
This one deserves its own heading because it's the single most common thing people expect a wash to fix and are disappointed when it doesn't.
The dark vertical stripes running down the face of aluminum gutters aren't dirt. They're a bonded film — roof oxidation and airborne grime carried over the gutter lip by rainwater and then held there by static. Pressure will not remove it. You can put a washer on those stripes all afternoon and they'll still be there.
Getting gutters genuinely white again takes a dedicated surfactant cleaner and hand agitation along each run. It's slow, it's separate from washing the house, and it's the reason a gutter brightening line sometimes appears on a quote. If it matters to you, say so up front and we'll price it. If a wash quote doesn't mention it, assume the streaks are staying.
When a wash is prep, a few extra things happen.
We check for chalking, which is old paint breaking down into powder under UV. Run a hand down the siding: if it comes away white, the surface is chalking, and that has to be washed off and often primed before new paint goes on.
We also treat the wash as an inspection. Water finds the soft spots. Rot around trim and window sills, failed caulk joints, loose boards, areas where a previous crew painted over a problem — it all shows up when a house is wet, and it's far better to find it before a quote is written than halfway through the job. Anything we find, you hear about with a photo.
Then the house has to dry properly. Not surface-dry. Painting a substrate that still holds moisture is one of the reliable ways to get blistering in the first hot week, and in Alabama humidity the wait is often longer than the calendar suggests.
Cleaning solutions that kill mildew will also stress landscaping if they're allowed to sit on it. Beds and shrubs against the house get wet down before we start, protected while we work, and rinsed after — pre-wetting dilutes anything that reaches them and is the part most often skipped.
Windows get closed and checked, and we'll flag any that are old enough to leak before we get near them with water rather than after.
We won't pressure wash an asphalt shingle roof. We won't wash a house an hour before a storm and call it finished, because rain on a half-rinsed wall leaves its own streaking. And we won't wash a house with widely failing paint without first telling you how much of that paint is likely to come off — you should hear that from us beforehand, not see it on the ground afterward.
Washing is the first step of most exterior painting projects and is included in those quotes. It's also how we start deck staining work. If washing turns up damaged timber, see wood replacement. We cover Montgomery, Prattville, Wetumpka, Millbrook and Pike Road.
Washed at the right pressure, with chemistry that actually kills what's growing. Free written estimate.
