GUIDE To Pressure Washing a House

This is Christy Idaho Painter here on PaintLife TV. Today I got a comprehensive guide on how to or how we go about painting a house. So I'm going to try to paint this house right here behind me in two days. But I got a day of pressure washing and then also a day of prep. So from start to finish it's going to be a four day process. So we're going to show you all the steps and give you a real thorough guide on how we go about doing it during all those steps. Today is going to be the first part of this video. It's a multi part video. This is going to be the pressure washing portion where we're going to be washing off this house. Then we're going to let it dry and come back tomorrow and do the prep work. So stay tuned for this comprehensive guide of how to properly or how we go about painting an exterior house. All right here we are. We are going to start the pressure washing process of this house. I'm going to give you some tips and tricks. The guide to how we properly clean a house. I'm going to show the tools we're going to be using and I'm going to start off with the pressure washer. I typically have two pressure washers. I have a smaller one. This is a Mighty M, a chore master. It's a 3200 PSI. Then I also have a larger belt drive pressure washer. It's a 4,000 PSI. It really makes getting high places a lot easier. But it takes two people to get the thing in and out and that's in a larger painting van. This one if you're just on your own, one person can get this thing in and out of a truck or a van easily. So there's the pressure washer I'm going to be using. I got some tools. I start off one of the most important things when it comes to pressure washing is this nozzle right here. This is an agitating, rotating nozzle. And I'm going to talk about that. I've got a couple guns here that I use. I'm going to show you the guns that we use and some of the tools that go along with that. Here's the gun. This is one of the gun that comes with the Mighty M pressure washer. This is an essential thing to have. A good quality gun. I like this extension right here. This is a six foot extension. This makes reaching high places very simple and easy to do without getting on a ladder. So a six foot straight extension. So here's the next gun I like. And this gun has an adjustable nozzle. There's a 3,500 PSI nozzle. It's called a spray flex. You can get 3,500 PSI or 5,000 PSI. So this makes getting in gutters and stuff like that or around areas. You need a flexible end on your gun. So this is attached permanently to that gun if I need it. It's called the spray flex. I do always have a ladder with me. And this is an extending ladder. So this ladder extends up about 22 feet right here. This makes getting those high places when you're alone. You can easily pack it away in a car, vehicle, or truck. And now I can get these high places with these. It's called an extend climb ladder. So necessary piece of equipment. Rotating nozzle. I want to just talk a little bit about the rotating nozzle because people see me using this thing all the time. And it actually rotates and spends. You can do a lot of damages when these things. You could damage the sighting on the house. You could damage the fence. You could even damage the concrete. But when used properly, this is an absolute amazing tool right here. And the reason why I use that is I don't use any chemicals when it comes to spraying the house. I don't like to use chemicals because of the drawback of killing grass and stuff like that. I know there's other environmentally safe chemicals that won't kill plants, grass and stuff like that. But I just don't like surrounding myself with chemicals or my customers. So I go just straight water. And this thing rotates. And so the rotation gives it like an agitating effect. It agitates the dirt and debris on the house. It makes cleaning in the house better, more efficient and just simply faster. So it's a must-have tool. This one is a mighty M. I believe this is a 5,000 PSI rotating nozzle. And the ones that are less PSI, they actually wear out a little bit faster. Not so cheap. It's about $90 for one of these things. I've got three hoses. I typically run three hoses. I've got a water hose hooked up to the pressure washer. That's about 100 feet. But then I hook three hoses up to my guns because they don't like to have to move my pressure washer around a whole lot, especially if I'm by myself. If I have a helper with me, like I have today, it makes it a little bit easier. But still, with the hoses I got here are three hoses. We probably won't even need to move the pressure washer one time. And that's just very simple and easy to do. If you're a do it yourself or you don't have to go to the extent of having three hoses, having all that length, you could rent all this stuff from a rental yard. Probably pretty cheap, less than $100 to pressure washer house. But I'm going to get up here. Start pressure washing. Some of the tips just don't get too close. If you get too close, you're going to damage something. Stay a safe distance away. You can work your way to the house as you get more comfortable. But you got metal doors that are a lot less likely to damage. But I've got wood siding. I'm easier to damage. And then you want to stay away from your screens. You can easily damage a screen with a pressure washer with any type of nozzle. I typically have two nozzles when I use the rotating nozzle about 95% of the house. And they got a high peak like that that I got to reach. Or if I got to knock down any type of hornet's nest and stuff like that, I use a straight shot nozzle. The red nozzle and it just shoots a straight shot. And it's good for knocking stuff down like that. This house is pretty clean. It's not going to take very long about an hour to pressure wash it. But enough talking. Let's get on with the working part of it so you can see what it looks like. Here we go. I just want to take a quick break right here. Just remind you, hit the subscribe button, hit the notification bell right next to it. That way you'll get subscribed and get notified every time I come out with a new video. If you don't hit the subscribe button and the notification bell, you'll never get notified by email. It's free, simple, easy to do. It's free. Just two clicks. And then also all the tools and accessories or some of the tools and accessories. I typically leave down in the video description below so you can learn a little bit more about them or if you're interested in purchasing them, some of them will even direct you right to our store at store.theitahopainter.com where you can purchase our really cool shirts, hats, paint life gear and apparel on your own time. So let's get back to the video. All right, so we're just cruising right along here, power washing, a pointer. If you need glasses, if you're doing any of the type of stripping or anything, you're going to have some wood chips or anything that could get in your eyes. Always wear safety glasses. I really love edge safety glasses. But they do get wet and then it's hard to see. So if you're doing any type of stripping and stuff and you need them, always have them with you. Here protection is really good to have. But if I'm working with somebody, I got somebody here helping me. You can't hear them if you got ear protection on. So if they were in danger and they need you to help desperately, you wouldn't be able to hear them. So not like wear an ear protection. If I'm working with somebody else, I'll wear it when I'm working alone though. Some tips and tricks. Just stay away. I'm typically about this far away from the house. When I get to the windows, I'm washing the windows. I'm even rinsing the windows down and the screens down. But I have a lot of experience and I'm staying about this far away from the screen and I'll get closer and closer as I'm more comfortable. But you can clean the screens if you're using your pressure washer nozzle right. But I'm just working my way around the house. It's good to work and flood the dirt from top to bottom. Because if you start from bottom up, you're just running dirt down onto the lower surface where you've already cleaned and stuff. I'm cleaning the gutters. Rotating nozzle is really great for cleaning the gutters. The gutters are metal. You don't have to worry about damaging them. But clean those things really, really good. You don't want any adhesion issues. Because on a house, the most notorious thing to have issues with paint, not adhering properly or paint failures is your gutters. So clean those things really, really well. I get really close to those things. Hit them pretty hard. But we're going to continue moving right along power washing here. Another tip is don't let your power washer or pressure washer run very long without squeezing the trigger. That's what cools the pump. So I just have a rule of thumb. Never let it run for more than minute without squeezing that trigger. Because I had a de-walt pressure washer that we ran for about five minutes without squeezing the trigger. And it burnt the pump out on it. So that's just a simple little pro tip. We're going to get cruising line right along here, pressure washing. And then we're going to allow this thing to dry. It's about 80 degrees outside. We'll let it dry here in our very dry non-human climate. You can actually come back the next day and start prepping. So I'm going to start finishing the power washing. And here we go. So I just want to quick note when you're watching this video, this six foot extension, you're going to see me using this. I actually love this thing. And one of the reasons why I think bends and flexes and it appears like it's probably going to take more effort to run the thing. But as it bends and flexes, it's kind of like a whip hose on an airless sprayer. It actually takes you'll less of an effort to move back and forth. Then you don't have to find ladders either. And it's just that bending motion and swaying motion just makes it easier to maneuver the gun and stuff. A lot less fatigue. It's absolutely amazing. I absolutely love these things. But throughout this house, I didn't have to get down the ladder. Probably 20, you know, three quarters of what I would have had to get on the ladder. So six foot extension. If you're on a two-story house, it's an absolute must. All right. We got this thing in all power wash now. A couple other pointers. And I'll just talk a little bit about the siding. So I know get a lot of questions. The wood siding or actually, it's not actually wood. That's what I want to talk about. It appears like it's wood. The siding, most of the siding here in Idaho is just on this fiber board. It's an imitation siding. It's kind of like ground up wood glued together, compressed, and then a paper put over the top of it. So it looks like wood. And this house probably should have been painted about five years ago. And so it's really blistered, really bad. And it's kind of falling apart. So you can see when I was power washing, I had to be very careful not to get too close. But it was actually coming tearing it up just a little bit. We're going to go back over that. We do the prepping. We're going to sand that peel on it. And it's going to look brand new when we're all done. So just be careful. Some of the window screens were really oxidized on that side of the house. The sun was really bad. So I didn't even try to clean those window screens. I just stayed away from them all together. One of them was really torn up. So that's some tips and tricks doing the pressure washing. When you're all done, it's great to just not get close to the concrete. But what I do is just sweep the concrete with my power washer. So I just blow off any debris and stuff like that. I did when I was up on the ladder. Notice one of the gutters wasn't flowing. And it was completely full of water, which will pose a problem when you come back to paint. So I just got the leaves and everything out of that. So the water will flow out of it. And then the way the gutter is actually entirely full. So it's easy for it to just pull off the house. So just a little customer service thing. This is the end of the video. This is what it looks like to what we how we go about pressure washing a house or power washing a house. Not to say that is the right way or the only way to do it. It's just how we do it. And it's worked for us for 18 years very effectively. This is the first part of this series comprehensive, comprehensive guide to how the Idaho Painter paints an exterior of a house. Stay tuned now for the prepping process. We're going to go through here. We're going to be doing some sanding. I'm a big believer in a product called peel bond. So XIM peel bond is going to glue all this blistering stuff down back together to be sanding some wood corables. And then we're going to be doing a whole lot of caulking. Some of it serves a purpose. Some of it is just a static. So stay tuned for that video. Next part two, the prepping. And don't forget if you haven't subscribed to our channel, hit the subscribe button, hit the notification bell. If you don't hit both of them, you're not going to get notified by email next time I come out with another video. It's free, simple, easy to do. It isn't cost you anything. Just click, click the subscribe button and the notification bell. Like we always say. We'll see you on the next video. Ow.