PressurePros

Busy birthday season. Happy Birthday, Everett.

:bday: SCOTT :bday: :cheers:

Ken, I switched over to using an Osborne brush instead of defelting pads. http://www.aloghomestore.com/clean.shtml#buffing-brush You don't want a ton of rpm's like on a grinder because you will burn the wood. I bought a couple of refurbished Makita polisher/buffers. The brush runs about $90 for the square bristled version and the polishers can vary betwen $40 and $250. Once you get the hang of them (they are heavy and a cheaper polisher will vibrate the fillings right out of your mouth) getting the fuzzies off of wood is quick and very thorough.

You are in for a real treat on this one. Three things I hope you billed into your estimate are 1) expensive specialty strippers made to remove paint. These strippers are usually thick like a gel so you are probably not going to be able to spray it on 2) a ton of dwell time to allow the stripper to mpenetrate multiple layers and 3) hours and hours of sanding if you are going with a semi trans. I offer two solutions for people with painted decks.. prime and solid stain or call another contractor. Unless the customer wants to pay $8/sf to have it restored and I have nothing else booked for a few days. Ihave done a few of these, call me on Monday if you need a good product. Expect to spend about $12 per gallon. You could also try something like this http://www.porter-cable.net/por74ifrecpo.html

Regular Olympic is junk. I think it goes for $8 per gallon. It will fail and be mold covered pretty quickly. Go to a paint store and you will find Deckscapes, Cabots, Sikkens SRD, or a house brand like Benjamin Moore. Stay tih an oil/alkyd and you will be fine with any of those but be prepared to spend over $25 per gallon. I have heard Olympic Maximum is a little better than the regular stuff but I never worked with it.

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Shane, the acid is very diluted. If the sealer on the deck is so weak that it comes up with the acid, then there is really no way you are going to be able to wash it without ruining the finish. I make sure the homeowner understands that if his deck is bad shape it's likely this will happen.

Prewetting the deck to saturation and applying an acid to the deck will neutralize your housewash mix as it lands.

My pop had a 70 Chevelle SS, 454, Muncie 4 speed, 9" posi rear, he was first owner. It took me six months of driving it after my 18th birthday to lose my license for a year for drag racing on front street. It had a very agressive cam profile.. If I close my eyes I can still hear it loping at idle.......... ::daydream:::

Boo-yah, excellent job, Scott !

If you are getting a projection TV, Pioneer Elite (not a regular Pioneer) is the best game in town. Mitsubishi ranks second. Sony's projection TV's were never as good as their tube TV's. If you are going with a large tube (40") Sony Vega. I worked for Tweeter for years. I'm not sure what recommendation to give you as far as the big box stores like Best Buy or Circuit City.

I have yet to see any property, deck or driveway that couldn't be made cleaner. I would just price the job accordingly. It seems silly to have someone call you to do work and then argue with them that they don't really want it. They called you, they obviously DO want it done.

Nice job, Matt, looks great. That almost looks like a semi-trans from the picture..was it a solid it's hard to tell ? The acrylics are truly a pain to take off. What stripper do you like to use?

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Thank you, Rich, Tony and Shane. This is definitely a job I would have turned down in mid season. Between estimating, testing, repairs, sanding and sealing, we made 5 trips to this customer's home. During peak season my price would have had to have been so high the homeowner would probably bad mouthed me to all his friends. Makes for a nice portfolio and this guy is a sportscaster on Comcast and writer for a major sport's magazine so I figured having him in my referal column was well worth the effort.

Looks Mopar. Lets see, is that hugger orange? If it were my dream car it's a hemi Cuda. Headlights look like early 70's. (after all this watch it be a 1984 Camaro LOL) what is it? Charger, Challenger? Other?

kbrooks, you will find that the competition is irrelevant if you know how to market and how to sell. Before you begin into this venture set a realistic budget. If you are going to do this full time, you will need a large and varied campaign. You need to convince people that it is YOU they want to perform the work not the other thirty schmoes listed in the yellow pages. This takes a fairly large advertising budget. In the beginning work will still be skinny until you are around for a year. That's why it is a good idea for most people to start this part time and keep the steady income. The actual cleaning has a learning curve, but by paying attention here and doing trials on friends and relatives you will get the hang of it. More important to any service industry is the ability to CLOSE YOUR SALES. So many guys are missing the boat on this and running around busting hump for chicken feathers (probably most of your competetion). I wish you the best.

Thanks Jeff.

One more time

We had to lay down 130 linear feet of new flooring. That was a project in itself since the builder used 4" spiral nails through 16 foot 2"x6" 's. Wood Tux Wet, custom color. Finished today.

I almost dreaded seeing this thing dry. Those of you that do wood, cedar especially, can imagine what all that super potent stripper did to the wood. You could have knit a cellulose sweater. Three hours later is was clean as whistle (Osborne brushes on variable speed buffers)

Another round of stripper, another two hour dwell and we were back. This time everything came up.

"Hmmmm, looks pretty bad for two years. Do you happend to know what product was used?" "Oh yeah, I still have the can in my garage" As he gets the can I am praying to myself.. Please don't be an acrylic, please don't be an acrylic. As he comes out of the garage I can see the words "7 YEAR GUARANTEE" on the label. Sh*t, this one is going to be fun. I go back to the truck and mix up my stripper full beans..ten oz per gallon. I spray it on a rail and wait. Ten minutes, nothing. Twenty minutes, nothing. It might as well have been water. I tell him I will be back this afternoon with his proposal. I wrote up the worst case scenario and charged accordingly. When I went back I mixed up the HD and added the booster. I screwed the lid onto the spray bottle and the sides of the bottle caved in and the thing was almost too hot to hold. Again I sprayed the rails. After a 40 minute dwell (keeping it wet) I was able to scrape some of the solid off with a tongue depressor. Looks like my worst case scenario wasn't even close. Modified the proposal again and met with the homeowners. Explained what was going on and the only way to rectify it. (They did not want a solid) Long story short after the husband and wife picked themselves up from the floor I got the go ahead. On the spot I mix up the amount of stripper I need. I'm wearing a 3M respirator and I can still taste it. I also thickened the mixture so it would not evaporate. I saturated the deck and wrapped the whole thing in plastic. We were back the next morning and things were slippery, most of the deck was still moist. I rewet the whole thing and went to town. Using 1000 psi (60 degree) this is the result we got on the first pass.

That blue siding often has issues. I would try downstreaming. Your X-Jet will leave lines. Use a double lance gun and when you rinse use low pressure and keep your distance from the siding constant. A ranch shouldn't be too bad doing it this way.

In thinking about the various civic groups and organizations I have belonged to, I figured it was time to ask myself what exactly these groups have done for me besides collecting dues.