Most of the 330-odd homes between 10th and 18th off Cleveland Boulevard went up between 1890 and 1950, and a lot of them are still wearing painted wood clapboard or shingle. That siding decides the pressure we use long before the dirt on it does. Soft wash only, $0.18 a square foot.
A 1912 Craftsman with painted cedar lap siding and a 2015 vinyl two-story in a Caldwell subdivision are not the same wall, even if they look equally dirty from the sidewalk. Vinyl is a sealed plastic skin. Painted wood on a hundred-year-old house is a stack of paint layers over softwood, and the bottom layers are older than anyone living in the house. Put a pressure washer tip on that and you don't clean it — you drive water behind the lap joints and take paint off in sheets. Every house here gets soft washed instead: a cleaning solution does the work at garden-hose pressure, dwells long enough to kill what's growing, then gets rinsed. Same result, minus the repaint bill.
The mature elms, maples and sycamores over Cleveland Boulevard and the side streets are the reason the north face of your house looks nothing like the south face. Shade plus the humidity these old lots hold after irrigation means the north and shaded east walls grow a thin green-to-black algae film, heaviest under the eave line and behind foundation shrubs that were planted close to the wall decades ago. That's biological, not dirt, which is why homeowners tell us scrubbing it makes it look better for six weeks and then it's back. Pressure alone knocks the surface layer off and leaves the roots. The soft wash mix kills it, so it comes back on a season timeline instead of a month one.
Look at the lowest 18 to 36 inches of your siding. In this district that band is usually a different color than the rest of the wall — a gray-brown or chalky white stripe right at sprinkler-head height. A lot of this part of Caldwell irrigates off pressurized canal water, and that water carries fine agricultural silt plus real mineral hardness. Every cycle throws it at the same strip of siding, and it dries there. On vinyl it rinses off. On painted wood and especially on stucco it soaks into the surface and builds a crust that a soft wash lightens a lot but does not always take to zero. Honest version: expect a big improvement on that band, not always a perfect match to the wall above it. If yours is heavy, adjusting the head arc or swapping to a lower trajectory nozzle does more for it long term than washing does.
Here's the test we'd run before you spend a dime: drag a dark rag or your palm down the south or west wall in a spot that gets full afternoon sun. If it comes back coated in white or pastel powder, that's chalking — the binder in the paint has broken down from UV and the pigment is letting go. Washing removes the loose chalk, and the wall will look noticeably better and stop streaking your windows and porch, but it will not restore the finish. Chalked paint is spent paint, and it will be chalking again by next summer. That's a painter's job, not ours. We'll tell you that on the estimate rather than sell you a wash that disappoints you in six months. Plenty of walls here only chalk on one elevation — that side is a repaint candidate, the other three are just dirty.
This district isn't all one material. The Tudor and Colonial Revival houses run stucco, which holds algae in its texture and needs a longer dwell and a very gentle rinse — stucco is the material most often wrecked by a pressure washer in Idaho. Brick and painted brick take the same low-pressure approach; on painted brick we watch for spots where the paint has already lost bond, because we're not going to be the reason it flakes. Cedar shingle and clapboard get the softest handling of all. All of it prices the same way: $0.18 per square foot, soft wash, safe for any siding on the block. Reflekt is locally owned, founded in 2025 by Hunter Stevens and Ethan Seusy, fully insured, 4.9 stars across 115+ Google reviews. Monthly and Quarterly memberships, no contract, 7-Day Rain Guarantee. Same-day and next-day slots most weeks — (208) 453-6760.
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Not the way we do it. We soft wash — the cleaning solution does the work and the rinse runs at about garden-hose pressure, so nothing is being driven behind the lap joints or under the paint edges. What does blow paint off old clapboard is a pressure washer tip held close, which is exactly what we don't put on these houses. If a section of paint is already lifting before we start, we'll point it out and work around it.
Because it's algae, and it lives under the mature tree canopy on these streets where that wall barely sees sun and stays damp after irrigation. Scrubbing or blasting removes what you can see and leaves what you can't, so it regrows fast. A soft wash kills it at the surface instead of just displacing it. It will still return eventually — shade and moisture aren't going anywhere — but on a yearly rhythm rather than a monthly one.
Mostly, usually not entirely. That band is silt and mineral from canal irrigation water baked into the same strip over years. Soft washing lifts the silt and a good share of the mineral, so it lightens a lot. On stucco and older painted wood, some of it has gotten into the surface and won't fully release. We'd rather tell you that up front than have you compare the band to the clean wall above it afterward and feel shorted.
It's a fair question in a district this old. Our work doesn't sand, scrape, blast or otherwise disturb the paint film — that's the difference between a soft wash and a pressure wash, and it's why we won't put high pressure on these walls. If your paint is actively flaking and you want it removed rather than washed, that's paint-removal work and you want a contractor set up for it, not us.
Yes, and stucco is actually the material we're most careful with. Its texture traps algae, so it needs a longer dwell time and a wide, low-pressure rinse. Stucco damaged by house washing in this valley is almost always a pressure-washer job — the tip erodes the texture and opens hairline cracks that then take on water. We don't use pressure on it at all.
Once a year handles most of these homes. If your lot is heavily shaded on the north side or your sprinklers hit the siding directly, the shaded elevation may want a touch-up between full washes while the sunny sides are fine. Some houses genuinely don't need it yet — if you're calling because of one dirty elevation, say so and we'll price just that side rather than the whole envelope.
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