Gretna

Pressure washing in Gretna

Gretna sits on the west bank behind the Mississippi River levee, and its older housing stock is the reason method matters more here than pressure. Much of the historic district is wood: clapboard, shotgun trim, wraparound porches and painted railings. Those surfaces hold mildew in the damp months and they are exactly the materials that high pressure damages fastest.

Where we focus in Gretna

• Soft washing for painted wood and historic trim
• Porches, steps, and walkways
• Driveways and brick
• Gutter and window cleaning

Historic wood needs a gentler method

On an older Gretna home we soft wash rather than blast: water under low pressure paired with a cleaning solution that kills mold and algae at the root, so paint, glazing putty, and soft wood stay where they belong. Concrete drives and brick walls can take the higher setting. If your house has that grey-green film that returns every spring, call (504) 688-3995 and we will look at it before quoting.

What high pressure does to old paint

Historic Gretna housing usually carries decades of paint built up in layers, and the bonds between those layers weaken long before the top coat looks bad. Force finds the weak layer, not the dirt, and lifts paint away in sheets. What was booked as a wash becomes scraping, priming and repainting an elevation, which costs many times the original job.

So the pressure gets set by the paint rather than by how dirty the wall is. Where the paint is already failing we will say so at the estimate, because washing reveals that rather than causing it and it is better to know which you are dealing with before we start.

Porches, railings, and the detail work

The wraparound porches and turned railings that give these houses their character are also where growth sits. Every spindle, bracket and joint is a shaded recess holding damp, and a broad spray passes straight over all of them. That work is done by hand with the solution worked in, which is slower than washing a flat wall and is what decides whether the finished job reads as clean from the street. Porch ceilings are the part most often skipped, and they are usually the dampest surface on the building.