Most of Meridian is vinyl. The blocks between Pine, Carlton and Idaho are not. Old Town's bungalows wear painted wood lap siding, some of it eighty years and a dozen paint layers deep, and it stains three different ways: sprinkler rust down low, algae on the north wall, chalk on the sun side.
Drive the original grid and you can date the walls. The core of Old Town went up roughly between 1905 and the 1940s, so the siding is painted wood lap, cedar or fir bevel boards with four to six inches to the weather and decades of paint stacked on them. Off the alleys you also find later stucco additions, a few brick and block infills, and rentals where somebody wrapped the original lap in vinyl in the nineties. Each one takes a different mix and a different rinse. Old paint is porous and holds mildew down in the grain. Stucco holds it in the texture and needs more dwell. Vinyl laid over wood will push water behind the J-channel if you hit it with pressure. On a mixed-material house we treat each elevation as its own job rather than running one setting around the whole building.
Orange staining across the bottom two or three feet of the front wall is the number one Old Town complaint, and it is the irrigation water. The ditch and well water feeding these older systems carries enough iron that a head throwing at the house every morning lays a rust band right along the lap boards, heaviest on whatever elevation the zone hits and lightest where the eaves keep it dry. Pressure will not remove that. Rust is a mineral bonded into the paint film, not dirt sitting on top of it, so blasting only chews the paint and leaves the stain behind. It takes a rust-specific treatment brushed on, given dwell time, then rinsed, and a heavy band sometimes needs a second pass. The permanent fix is on your side: turn that head or drop its arc so it stops painting the siding daily.
Old Town has the only mature canopy in Meridian, elm and poplar planted when the townsite was young, and shade plus a north exposure grows algae. On a bungalow with a big elm out front, the north and northeast walls go green and gray within a couple of seasons while the south wall still looks fine. That is live growth, not dirt. It comes off with a soft-wash mix at low pressure and enough dwell time to actually kill it, then a gentle rinse from the top down. Killing it matters more than scrubbing it. Strip only the surface and the roots stay down in the grain of the paint, and the wall is green again after one wet spring. Under heavy canopy, north elevations usually want washing about every other year even when nothing else on the house does.
Before you book, wipe a dark rag hard across the south or west wall. If it comes back coated in white powder, that paint is chalking, meaning the binder has broken down under decades of Idaho sun. Washing a chalked wall is still worth doing and it will come out cleaner and far more even, but know what happens: we remove the loose chalk layer, and what is underneath is the faded original color. Homeowners sometimes look at a washed chalky wall and think we bleached it. We did not. We took off the powder that was making the surface look lighter and hazier than the paint really is. If the chalk is heavy on the rag, the honest answer is that the house is due for paint and a wash is a hold-over, not a repair. We will say so at the walkthrough.
House washing is $0.18 per square foot, soft-wash, safe on painted wood, stucco, brick and vinyl alike. On these lots the logistics matter as much as the number. Old Town is the original grid, so the lots are narrow and deep, setbacks are short, garages sit off back alleys, and parking is on the street. Tell us whether to stage off the alley or the curb and which side is clear. Shrubs planted decades ago now sit tight against the foundation, so we pre-wet plantings, rinse them again after, and keep the mix off anything in bloom. Memberships run monthly or quarterly with no contract, and the 7-Day Rain Guarantee applies. Same-day and next-day slots open most weeks. Reflekt is locally owned and fully insured, started in 2025 by Hunter Stevens and Ethan Seusy, 4.9 stars across 115+ Google reviews. Call (208) 453-6760.
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Not the way we do it. Soft washing cleans with a mild mix and dwell time instead of pressure, so the wall gets a low-pressure rinse rather than a blast. What actually strips old paint is a pressure tip held on lap boards, which also drives water up behind them. If paint is already peeling or cracked in spots, we point it out first, because a wash will lift loose flakes that were going to come off anyway.
Sprinkler overspray. The irrigation water in Old Town carries iron, and a head throwing on the house every morning leaves a rust stain baked into the paint film. It is not dirt, so pressure will not touch it. We treat it with a rust-specific product, let it dwell, then rinse, and a heavy band may need two passes. Adjust or lower that head afterward or the band comes right back next season.
Yes, and on a shaded Old Town lot that is often the smart buy. Algae grows where the canopy keeps a wall damp, so the north and northeast elevations foul years before the sun sides do. We can soft-wash a single elevation and price it by that square footage. If the rest of the house is only lightly dusty, washing one wall now and the full house next spring is a reasonable plan and we will tell you if that is the case.
It changes the rinse. Vinyl retrofitted onto old lap siding usually has gaps at the J-channel and corner posts, and pressure aimed at those seams pushes water into the wood cavity behind, where it has no fast way out. We keep the wand angled downward and the pressure low, clean the chalky film vinyl develops, and skip anything that would force water up under a course.
Yes. Pre-war sash has brittle glazing putty, so we keep the wash away from the putty line and off the sills instead of running water across them, and we dry down anything that got wet on the way past. Soft washing helps here since there is no high-pressure stream to force past a failing bead. If a bead is already cracked or missing, we flag it rather than soak it.
Full house, about every two to three years for most of these bungalows. Shaded north walls under the elms usually want it every other year, and a wall taking daily sprinkler hits should get looked at annually before the rust sets deeper. If your siding is only dusty and nothing is green, streaked orange or chalking on the rag, you can wait. We would rather tell you to hold off than sell you a wash you do not need yet.
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