Boise screens catch things other valley screens don't: aphid honeydew off the North End maples, decomposed granite blowing down out of Hulls Gulch, and cottonwood fluff off the river corridor in June. We pull every screen, hand-wash it flat in pure deionized water, and put it back where it came from. $50 flat.
A window screen is a filter nobody ever changes. In the North End, the East End and along Harrison Boulevard, the maples and lindens overhead mist aphid honeydew all summer, and that sticky sugar film lands on the mesh and glues dust to it, so the screen goes gray and stays gray straight through a rainstorm. Up in the Highlands, Boise Heights and Warm Springs Mesa, nightly downslope wind out of Hulls Gulch and Cottonwood Creek carries pale, sharp decomposed-granite grit off the Boise Front and packs it into the weave. Along the river through Barber Valley and Bown Crossing, late-May cottonwood fluff mats the mesh solid. Add winter inversion soot, August wildfire ash and canal overspray, and most Boise screens are holding four different kinds of dirt at once.
Boise screens are not one thing. The 1890s-1910s homes on Warm Springs Avenue and Harrison Boulevard, and the 1905-1935 bungalows and Foursquares through the North End and East End, run wood-framed half-screens over double-hung sash, hand-fit to one specific opening, often with brittle old spline or tacked bronze mesh and original hooks. Those get numbered as they come out so each one goes back in the window it was cut for, and they never see a pressure washer. Bench ranches in Depot Bench, Morris Hill, Vista and Hillcrest carry 1950s-60s aluminum slider and jalousie screens with chalky oxidized frames and soft corner keys that pull apart if you flex them. West Bench tract houses in Collister and Veterans Park have sun-baked 1980s aluminum and early vinyl frames. Barber Valley and Harris Ranch builds have fewer screens than owners expect, because the big fixed picture units don't have any.
Every screen comes out and gets laid flat. Nothing gets scrubbed in place against the glass, because that just drives grit into the mesh and down onto the sill. Both faces get a soft brush to break the honeydew film and lift the packed granite dust, then a full flush with 100% pure deionized water and no soap at all. That matters more on screens than it does on glass: soap left in the weave stays tacky, grabs the next round of dust inside a week, and the first rain runs it down onto the window you just paid to have cleaned. DI water carries no minerals, so on Boise's 10 to 13 grain water there is nothing left behind to spot the mesh or chalk the frame. Screens go back into their own openings and we check the seat and hardware before we leave.
Stand inside, three feet back, and look through a screened window at something with detail: a tree trunk, a fence board, a neighbor's siding. Then look through an unscreened window on the same wall. If the screened view is hazy and the bare one is sharp, the screens are your problem, not the glass. Second check: press a fingertip into the mesh and pull it back. Tacky means aphid honeydew. Pale gray powder means foothills grit or winter inversion soot. The honest part: if your screens are under a year old, on a shaded north side, and out of reach of any canal-fed sprinkler head, skip this. You will not get $50 of visible improvement. And if the mesh is torn, dented or bellied out of the frame, washing won't fix it. That is a rescreen, not a cleaning.
Two dates matter here. Mid-April is the irrigation turn-on, when the season's dirtiest first water pushes through every head fed off the Boise City Canal, the Ridenbaugh and the New York Canal. That water is untreated, silty and mineral-heavy, and one misaimed impact head lays a tan film and hard white spotting right into the mesh. Worth cleaning after the system is dialed in, not before. Late May into mid-June is black cottonwood fluff along the Greenbelt, Barber Valley and Bown Crossing, and cleaning screens in that corridor in the third week of May is money spent twice. Wait until the fluff quits. Early fall is the other good window: get the mesh clear before the North End and East End leaf drop and before the first honest rain turns three baked-on months of dust into streaks.
Fifty dollars covers every screen on the house, hand-cleaned. Not per screen, not per window. On a Bench ranch that might be nine screens; on a North End Foursquare with half-screens and seasonal storms it might be thirty, and the price does not move. Most people add it to a window cleaning, since dirty mesh and dirty glass re-dirty each other and doing one without the other is half a job. Members get their annual screen clean free. Monthly and Quarterly plans, no contract, and quarterly service runs about $100 less per cleaning than one-off work. Reflekt is locally owned, fully insured, founded in 2025 by Hunter Stevens and Ethan Seusy, and rated 4.9 stars across 115+ Google reviews. Same-day and next-day slots open up Monday through Saturday, 7am to 7pm. Call (208) 453-6760.
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$50 flat for every screen on the house, hand-cleaned, no matter how many there are. A West Valley tract home with a dozen and a Warm Springs Avenue historic house with thirty pay the same. It is usually booked alongside a window cleaning, and Monthly and Quarterly members get one screen cleaning free every year.
You can, and on light dust it helps. Plain hose water will not lift aphid honeydew, though, and it will not move packed foothills grit out of the weave. Two warnings from doing this for a living: never pressure wash a screen, since it blows mesh loose from the spline and bows old aluminum frames, and never dry-wipe granite dust, because that grit is sharp enough to scratch.
Yes, and they get handled differently from vinyl. Wood-framed half-screens on double-hung sash are hand-fit to one opening, so we number them as they come out and reinstall each in its own window. They get washed flat with a soft brush, never pressure washed. If we find dry-rotted frame stock, brittle spline or mesh already pulling loose, we show you before touching it rather than forcing it back in.
Yes. Two-story stucco homes in Southeast and Southwest Boise, Columbia Village and Surprise Valley usually have bedroom screens sitting above tight foundation planting, and the newer Harris Ranch and Bown Crossing builds have narrow side yards. We work off ladders with standoffs and pull those screens down to clean them flat, same as ground floor. No extra charge for upper-story screens.
Not by itself. Streaks on the glass come off with a proper glass cleaning. But leaving the screens dirty is why the glass gets bad again quickly: honeydew and granite dust sit in the mesh a half-inch from the window, and every sprinkler cycle and gusty foothills afternoon moves some of it onto the pane. Clean glass behind a loaded screen does not stay clean long.
A lot of North End and East End owners do, especially on homes running seasonal storm windows. Off-season removal keeps mesh out of the December through February inversion soot and lets more of the low winter sun into the house. If you store them, keep them upright and labeled by opening so they seat right in spring. We can clean and reinstall, or clean and stack them wherever you want them.
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