
The Garden District has the largest, most detailed painted timber facades in the city, and almost none of it tolerates a pressure washer.
The Garden District has the largest and most detailed painted timber facades in the city. Galleries, columns, dentil work, cast iron, and mature gardens pressed close to the walls. Almost none of it tolerates a pressure washer. Layered older paint lifts under force, cast iron holds growth in every scroll and joint, and the planting that gives the district its name sits directly under everything we would be rinsing.
Work here is slow by necessity. Solution is worked into the detail rather than sprayed across it, and the gardens are wet down before and rinsed after, which on these lots is a real part of the job rather than an afterthought. Ironwork and painted timber get the same low pressure; the stone and brick paths can take more.
The ironwork here is the detail people notice, and it is the surface that holds the most growth per square foot. Every scroll, rosette and joint is a place where damp sits and algae establishes, and a broad spray passes over all of it. It has to be worked into by hand, and where the paint on the iron is already failing, washing will reveal that rather than cause it. Older cast iron is also brittle at the thin sections, so force is the wrong tool regardless.
The planting that gives the district its name sits immediately below everything being cleaned, and much of it is mature and not easily replaced. Cleaning solution running off a gallery into a bed is what damages it. Plants get soaked with clean water before we start so they cannot take up solution, dense beds get covered rather than relying on rinsing alone, and everything is rinsed again at the end. On these properties that protection is a real part of the day, not a precaution bolted on.