Full House Cleaning in Crystal Lake, IL

For this project we were assigned to clean and Softwash the entire northern Crystal Lake farm-home from top to bottom. We needed to softwash the entire roof and all it's complexities, all the gutters WITH permanent gutter guards, all the walls and windows and a massive paver deck, and multiple levels of stone retaining walls that wrapped around the house. It was a BIG project.

We rolled into the driveway at exactly 9am and went to work.

The first task was blowing out the gutters with a leaf blower, and physically brushing away the heavy moss that was building up on the roof. This home was set under multiple old-growth oak trees, which were the cause of lots of organic growth and debris all around the home. We took a backpack blower and cleared all the physical debris that we could from the roof and gutters. We removed a few sections of the gutter guards and this allowed us to clear the rest of the debris out of the gutters.

Despite what everyone believes, gutter guards do in fact let organics through, slowly. Small debris always makes it's way into the gutters and over time moss and other debris will 100% build up in the gutters. In the field, most gutters with gutter guards that we see are incredibly dirty and clogged, just because people neglect them because they believe nothing gets into the gutters.

Either way, we got them super clean, and re-installed the gutter gaurds.

The next step was to Softwash the roof.

We use a 12v pump hooked up to a mixing manifold that supplies the algicide used to treat the roof growth. This process entailed pulling lengths of the hose to multiple locations, crawling the peak of the roof, and moving the ladder multiple times in order to apply enough algicide to the roof, in every possible location. When the algicide is applied to the roof, the organic growth is completely neutralized, and turns cotton white. It should completely stop growing from that point forward. The algicide is intended to be left on and during the summer the rain and heat cycles will rinse most of the leftover lichen (algae) off the roof.

Once the roof was done we were off to the house softwash! This house was so big and so dirty that we needed to wash the house several times to get all the organics cleaned. Sometimes a house wash can be as fast as an hour if the house doesn't have extremely heavy growth. But this one was heavy enough where the project took several soap cycles. and took several hours to fully complete.

The next step was the pool deck Softwash. This was a quick job just to get the deck cleaned up. We blew all the debris off so that the whole deck was clear, rinsed it, soft washed it, and rinsed it again across every board to get the dirt and organics out of the wood.

After this the only step was the massive paver patio. This was probably the hardest part of the job as it required using our "turbo-nozzle" and a traditional pressure washing wand for several hours. This was a VERY messy and muddy project.

At the end of the day the house looked AWESOME. Everything was completely clean, the gutters looked great, the pavers looked better. The customer was happy and so were we. That is our goal and so we will consider this a win!

We have received several personal reference jobs from this customer and hope to return again to keep the house looking super clean within a year or two.

Service provided: House Washing

Budget: $2000

Location: Crystal Lake, IL