The Joys of Pressure Washing

My neighbor Craig has a super 9 HP Honda pressure washer that he keeps in a nearby storage unit. He’s let me use it before, and after he got done with it Saturday he let me have a turn. I set out to cruise “around the house real fast and clean off the gutters”, which have gathered a couple years of black moldy stuff. If anyone makes black gutters, I think they’d be a great idea. Then, though, I realized that the first floor gutters weren’t the worst of it. The second story ones have NEVER been cleaned off since we moved in about 4 years ago. That’s like 4 winters of slime accumulation. So, we devised a method where I’d unfold my super telescoping Costco ladder and lean it against the gutter and climb up a little. Then, L would hand me the pressure nozzle, hold the ladder steady, and I’d climb up further. All the training I got as an expendable youth on Franklin Street doing gutter duty really paid off. It was a little tricky to loop an arm through a rung and spray and not lean back from the pressure. But, we repeated the process several times. To get one part of the gutter, I had to get off and onto the roof. I supported one foot against a piece of corner trim and leaned back against the roof to spray up and back. A composite shingle roof gets REALLY hot on a sunny day. While changing last night, L was asking what the marks on my back are. I think I burned them on the roof through my wet shirt. Ouch! I also cleaned off a lot of black stuff on my paint and the front porch columns and so on. Most of the paint stayed on the house, thankfully. And thankfully, I won’t be making a claim on my disability insurance, which is paid up, by the way.