Under PRESSURE!

We had a little buddy visit us for a month this fall - my parent's pressure washer! We'd noticed that the small bits of siding on our house looked pretty dingy and wanted to try to get rid of the mold.

We plugged him into the water and electrical supply and got to work.

We found it worked better when we could get close to the wall, so for the side of the house that's just above the one-floor garage, we could easily perch on the ladder. We tried to work top to bottom to minimize the amount of water that got pushed up between the panels, but we didn't always succeed.

See? Top to bottom:

Isn't it a huge improvement? We could still see some stubborn grime but decided to quite while we were ahead - I hated using all that water and we could just imagine accidentally aiming wrong and breaking a window or a roof slate.

Then it was onto the back, which was quite a bit higher. D stood on the ladder - extended this time - while I spotted him from the ground. The pressure wasn't that high, but I still envisioned some horrible "Funniest Home Video" incident where the pressure pushed him and the ladder to the ground, so I held on tight.

Much better!

The side of the second floor was a little more awkward because of the height and the angle. We did what we could, but it still looked pretty dingy when we gave up.

I briefly left my post beside the ladder to snap this shot - see how we just couldn't get the right angle to really clean it?

The last side was much easier except for all the overgrown shrubs and ivy all around, making it hard to position the ladder and all the cords. We couldn't quite reach well because of the length of our hose, but we still managed to give it a decent scrub.

In all, we spent about 2 hours on this project and won't have to do it again for another few years. We also hit the wood trim under the gutters as we made our way around the house, so that's looking much whiter now as well (it's amazing how we didn't notice it was dingy until we started washing it). Definitely all worth the effort, especially with free access to the pressure washer.