plainpainter

Mike - I try not to buy the cheap crap from China - but as of late, we aren't even given the choice these days. It's not like there is an 'American' made aisle and a chinese aisle. I mostly go to hardware stores and am forced to buy chinese - they don't stock anything else. I already don't shop at Wal-fart and other bix box stores. But I find I am not even given the choice to support american made products. Heck, some american cars have tons of foreign made parts.

Jeff - do you think the longer our economy goes in this direction, will more people wake up and realize how bad republicans are? Heck even the party faithfuls that backed Nixon in watergate - finally after time came to realize he did in fact do a criminal act. Bring on the Democrats and taxation! I'd rather be making 80-90 grand paying taxes - then under republicans working for McDonalds - thinking about how much better my life is flipping burgers while the rich are no longer unfairly double-taxed on their dividends.

I think the wtw isn't beading water - is because a cure alkyd is something water will cling to. Timber oil isn't a cured finish - it's a oil impregnated finish that water can't cling to - so it beads even close to 2 months after application. I am not arguing the pros and cons - or wtw is doing it's job or not. It just looks really cool - I like the Timber Oil product.

I knew you'd like that one Rod, I had someone at the roundtable meeting swipe some of John T's special 'ambien' pills and mail them to me. They're definitely a trip - that will make you come up with some silly thoughts - hee hee. Anyways I can kind of understand you on the penetrol - although I never understood what exactly are the ingredients apart from regular thinner? But the reference to emulsabond - I have absolutely no clue where you came up with that idea? Isn't that Floods additive for latex paints that will make it stick to chaulky/problematic surfaces w/out a need to prime? Perhaps Rod - you took some of John's ambien pills as well? Hee hee - maybe you were thinking of Jap drier?

Just sit back, relax, and watch reruns of Gilligan's Island until spring comes back!

Beth, just curious - do you and Rod use a percarbonate cleaning step between stripping and neutralizing? Or do you consider the stripping agent alone as both stripping and cleaning? Or do you evaluate each deck for whether or not it needs an additional cleaning/percarb step?

That's mildew baby....I have been stripping with Sodium hydroxide strippers followed by a oxalic bath - but noticed that sometimes the deck wasn't totally 'right'. Several times I explained it away - then I looked on my invoices and I write - strip/clean/ph-balance. Soooooo - I thought about - and decided that even if NaOH is good at killing mildew - it says so in some places, I only allow it to work through the old stain - and don't allow it to overly dwell into the wood - which I don't want anyways, since you will end up with furring. So what I have done is - cut down on my rinsing time - didn't overly rinse the stripper off - just enought to remove the old finish - and then I applied an oxi-clean/TSP over the entire surface and watched it do it's magic - it can also remove any remaining finish the NaOH stripper didn't - and really cleans up the wood well - you could try EFC-38. It actually lightened the wood as it dwelled - then I rinsed completely and the ox'd - and since then have had no more issues. The problem is - I can't downstream a percarb solution, and it is an extra step. I'd like to see what more seasoned pro's seem to think.

Deck Restoration is listed in my ad - and has netted a bunch of really nice jobs.

I've had really bad luck with furring this year - and to be honest I don't know how to charge for all the sanding. For now I am just eating the labor on the sanding part - trying to build up a clientale - and then hopefully, when I am not so 'hungry' I will offer sanding as an upsell. But I have done decks the year before that came out perfect with absolutely no sanding - but this year hit a bunch of winners.

the reason it worked so well, because you first went over the area with HD-80 and krudkutter. You could have just followed up with a rag and lacquer thinner - would have done the same thing.

Those stains aren't extractive bleeding - I know what tannin stains look like - you can kill mildew with oxalic acid - I've seen mildew on fiberglass boat hulls come off with a Flood's deckswood, which is an oxalic based wood cleaner. That stuff is nasty mildew - I found some on a painted surface as well, it took 2 hrs of brushing with a TSP/bleach/surfactant mix to finally remove it. I'd look into 2 stepping, first with a strong layer of oxalic/surfactant - then apply a strong bleach - with no caustics added. The combination at the very least will create a hypoclorous acid - let dwell. Then rinse - then come back with a killer TSP/bleach combo to remove the stain - if it's still there.

Do you guys get these calls asking for just one side of a home pressure washed? I find these requests highly annoying - it's the side that is really green - but the rest of the house is still mildewed. It seems as if the homeowner has forgotten how truly white their house can become. So what do you guys do? I have been telling them that I don't do partial house washes. But it has gotten so annoying - I am thinking of quoting an estimate for the entire home and then giving them that quote for the one side. Do these people think I will haul a trailer 17 miles and wash one side of a home for $50 bucks?!?!?! I just don't get the general rudeness and inability homeowners to recognize how costly it is to run a business. Don't they ever just think for 2 seconds that perhaps it's costly equipment, costly advertizing, costly insurance - what gives? I remember a financial officer telling me that when I was an engineer making 52k. That their accountants billed me at 200k a year operating expense. And at the end of the year - they were only left with 5-7% ebit with those estimation guidelines!

Well - cleaned out 130 feet of gutters today - took me an hour and a half and charged the customer $150. I figured I could easily do that 3 times a day with all the driving inlcuded - and thought it could be very lucrative. Just a couple ladders, buckets, gloves - and you can gross $2,500 a week by yourself. The only problem - you'd probably never get consistent work like that for more than a week per year if you were lucky - only if. Seems like alot of things in this business are lucrative when you look at it from the point of view of time spent on the job - but when you take in the whole picture - it's tough making a buck. And I got some joker advertizing in the newspaper $45-$75 per average house - LOL. I have spent $20 in gas alone looking at the job and returning to do the work.

My spraytech has been fine - titan is better quality - but to be honest, I haven't had the volume of work that make the titan purchase worth it. Commerical painters that spray, can't screw around - they have to get a quality beast to put up with their demanding schedule.

I picked up a Spraytech 7/8 hp .33gpm airless sprayer from Sherwin Williams last year for around $300 on sale. It has been great I have used it to spray all my deck coatings. Perhaps it's overkill and a Deck'r is a better tool. But I turn the pressure all the way down - plastic tarp the sides of the home and use a blue tarp for the railings and a 2x6 to keep it in place - and have done decks extremely fast this way. I've also used it to paint entire homes with exterior solid oil stains as well. It's an important tool in the arsenal of deck care. I am done with rolling decks - I still backbrush the deck boards by hand after spraying. But I still get stuff done incredibly fast.

Remember that show Monster Garage, where they came up with these totally wacked out hot-rod creations that performed a task. I wonder if they ever came up with a pressure washing hot rod?

Ok - so I got this house washing/gutter scrubbing/composite deck washing. But all the balusters were Fir - but with composite railings. It had a nasty film forming stain - not even a very big deck. Well After I stripped - neutralized and then came back - my god - that fir was soooooo furry. And I know I was reasonable with the stripper - because there were still some traces left that the stripper didn't totally dissolve - so I hand sanded all the balusters and palm sanded for 8 hours. Then came the even trickier part - I hadn't realized the extent of taping and tarping and cutting I would have to do to get the stain on the spindles and not the floor or the railings - so you can imagine with a restored muscle car in the driveway - all vinyl house - no way incarnation I could spray either. I ended up hand painting the stain on all the spindles for a whopping 10 hrs of labor - LOL. I totally F'd up on this job. The question is - when you come across jobs like this - where one element is different like composite decking - and it totally changes the game plan and an additional 10+ hours of labor, should we pass up on the work? Charge steeply for it? Or just take it on the backside to acquire a yearly house washing customer? I won over the homeowners and will be getting maintenance work - but I ate 18hrs of labor - even at a lowly painters wage of $45/hr that's still $810. And oh god Fir is the absolute worst in furring - all the wood had this incredible Santa Claus beard everwhere. IT sucked!

Rick - you should have asked me - that's exactly the wood in my other post. It's straight grained fir - but not douglas fir. Douglas fir has a whole different look to it. It was the wood of porch decks prior to the invention of pressure treated.

Rick - that's exactly what I was confronted with!

I think if a homeowner asked me not to get the windows wet, I'd be the one with the blank stare. Wow! And I thought my last interior paint job where the client commented on how the walls had a ripply effect from rolling on the paint - was super annoying.

Ken - you have no idea how tedious - let's just say a rough 10x15 deck, took me 10 hours of labor, two days of 5 hours - that's all I could stand to do per day - it totally blew, I just don't know how I will handle future projects like this. But I thought it was so cool that the guy had fir instead of pressure treated. Kevin - I will go back and take pictures - it came out absolutely beautiful.

No way - no how, was I going to take that railing apart. I'd like to know Rick how much you charge per linear foot of railing - I think I'd have to charge even more, as the hand rail was composite - so I had to cut in each spindle at the top along with the 2x4 stringer along the bottom of the composite hand-rail - man it blew.

you're kidding right, Kevin?

you have a point Aaron. I love the customers that stand next to me while I am washing - one guy, as I was rinsing his bushes and rinsing the area of chemical on the ground to dilute it - was telling me not to rinse into the shrubbery - as he didn't want the chemical to get there. Can you believe it, either they want the mildew off or not, the chemical is going to go into the ground no matter what - and I can dilute it so it's not a problem, but that's it.

Kevin - once you get rid of all the chalkiness of vinyl siding with repetitive cleanings with TSP/Sodium hydroxide and high pressure rinses. All the vinyl will be fresh and shiny - and then anything that remains in the way of wtw, can then be easily removed with lac. without harm to the vinyl.