Willowbrook sits against Can-Ada Road on Star's west edge, so the stucco and Hardie on these custom homes takes crop dust off Canyon County ground before anywhere else in town. Add pressurized canal irrigation hitting the bottom four feet, and the walls dirty from two directions at once.
Willowbrook went up as custom and semi-custom builds, and the exteriors show it: stucco across most of the two-story elevations, Hardie lap and shake on the newer lots, cultured stone wainscot around the base, and vinyl on some of the earlier phases and outbuildings. Those materials don't clean the same way. Stucco is porous and holds a green film down inside the texture that a fast rinse skips right over. Hardie is stable, but the caulk joints and butt ends are exactly where water gets behind if somebody drags a pressure tip along them. Vinyl looks the toughest and is the easiest of the three to force water behind through a lap seam. We soft-wash all of it — low pressure, cleaning solution doing the work, rinsing at the angle the siding is lapped for.
Star runs pressurized irrigation off canal water, and Willowbrook lots are big enough that heads throw onto the house instead of stopping at the lawn. You get a distinct band across the bottom three or four feet: gray silt haze on stucco, mineral crust on the stone skirt, and under a lot of heads, orange-brown streaking that's iron in the water oxidizing on the surface. Silt and mineral film come off with a soft wash. The iron staining does not — pressure doesn't move rust, and anyone who tries hard enough to prove otherwise is going to scar your stucco doing it. Rust takes an oxalic treatment as a separate step, and it takes turning that head away from the wall or it's back by August.
Two different problems on the same house. North and northeast walls, plus anything shaded by fence lines or mature trees on the west lots, stay damp long enough after irrigation and winter inversion to grow algae. That's the green-black cast low on the wall and under the eave returns. It's organic, so it comes off with solution and stays gone longer than plain dirt would. South and west walls have the opposite issue: full afternoon sun with nothing blocking it out here, and a coating that's broken down at the surface. Rub it and chalk comes off on your hand. Washing takes the loose chalk off and the wall looks better, but it doesn't restore the finish — heavy chalking means the paint or stucco coating is near the end of its life.
We pre-wet and cover the landscaping first, which matters more on these lots than most because Willowbrook homeowners put real money into their beds. Then we apply the cleaning mix from the bottom up, let it dwell so the algae and the dust film release on their own instead of being blasted off, and rinse top down at low pressure. Gutter faces, soffit, eave returns, stone, and the window frames all get done in the same pass. House washing runs $0.18 per square foot, safe for stucco, Hardie, vinyl, brick, and cedar. We give you the number before we start, based on the actual wall square footage and how much of the house is two-story, not a guess over the phone.
The heavy dust in Willowbrook comes in two waves — spring disking and planting across the county line, then silage and grain harvest from roughly August into October. Irrigation runs all summer on top of it. Most houses out here do best washed once a year in late fall, after harvest dust has settled and before winter inversion sets algae into the north walls. If your north side is already green or the sprinkler band has gone from haze to crust, don't wait for the calendar. We run same-day and next-day slots to Star most weeks, memberships are Monthly or Quarterly with no contract, and every job carries the 7-Day Rain Guarantee. Fully insured, locally owned, 4.9 stars across 115+ Google reviews. Call (208) 453-6760.
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Not the way we do it. Stucco damage comes from pressure, not from cleaning — a narrow tip held close will chew the texture and drive water into hairline cracks that were already there. We soft-wash at roughly garden-hose pressure and let the solution do the work. If your stucco already has spider cracking or a failed patch, we'll point it out before we wash rather than after.
Sun. The north and northeast walls never dry fully between irrigation cycles, and in a Treasure Valley winter they stay damp under inversion fog for weeks. That's ideal for algae. The south and west walls get baked dry every afternoon, so nothing grows there — they just fade and chalk instead. Same house, opposite problems, and they need different handling.
A standard soft wash will not. Those streaks are iron from the irrigation water oxidizing on the wall, and no amount of pressure or soap moves rust. It takes an oxalic acid treatment, which we can add as a separate step. It'll come back within a season or two unless that head gets adjusted or a deflector added so it stops hitting the house.
Wash it first, then decide. Washing removes the loose chalk and gives you an honest look at the color underneath — sometimes it's fine and you buy several more years. If it chalks heavily again within a few months, the coating is spent and washing is only cosmetic. We'll tell you which one we think you're looking at. We'd rather you not pay for a wash expecting it to read as new paint.
Not if it's handled right. We pre-wet plants and lawn before anything goes on the wall, cover what's sensitive, and rinse everything down again when we're finished — water dilutes the mix well below anything that hurts established beds. On these lots the bigger risk is runoff pooling in a low bed, so tell us if you have new plantings or anything you're babying and we'll route around them.
Yes, and it's the right order — house wash first, windows after, because washing the walls puts dirty runoff across the glass. If we do them the other way you'll be looking at spotted windows the same afternoon. Tell us when you book that you want both and we'll schedule enough time to do them back to back in one trip out to Willowbrook.
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