I Choose re-coat recycled paint...

Here's a new commercial highlighting re-coat recycled paint. If you're looking for professionally coordinated color schemes, easy decorating, high quality, economical and environmentally responsible paint then you need to look into re-coat. Stop out at any RepcoLite, Port City Paints or Snyder Paints location for more info. Or, just go to www.recoatpaint.com

Cleaning Your Siding After a Fire

It's Spring.  And with weather like we've been having, many of us are feeling the itch to turn our attention to the exteriors of our homes.  We'd like to clean them up, spruce them up, get them looking good again after winter.

In fact, a customer of ours just posted a comment on our facebook page (which you should check out here and become a fan!) requesting that we talk about how to clean the siding of our homes.

Turns out he had a fire recently and a lot of the siding is now smoke-stained.  Now, with the nice weather (and with Tulip Time approaching), he's feeling the push to get that siding cleaned up and looking good again.  

So to hopefully help him out (as well as others of you with the same issues), here's the scoop when it comes to cleaning smoke damage from your vinyl or aluminum siding.  (And by the way, if your siding is simply dirty, you can skip straight to step 4!)

WHAT YOU'LL NEED:

•  Soot Sponge 
•  Broom/Tire Brush
•  Shop Vac
•  Jomax House Cleaner (available at RepcoLite and Port City Paints)
•  Hose or Power Washer
•  Garden Pump-Up Sprayer 

WHAT YOU SHOULD DO:

Step 1:  Dry Brush

The first thing to do when you've got smoke damage is to resist the urge to rinse it all down with water and various cleaners.  This often can make the mess worse and harder to clean up.  Instead, start with a broom or a tire brush and go over your siding, lightly brushing away as much of the loose debris and dry soot particles as possible.

Step 2:  Vacuum

Once you've done this, it's time to break out your shop-vac (with a brush attachment if you've got one).  Go over the siding again, removing as much of the soot and debris as possible.

Step 3:  Break Out the Soot Sponge

After you've done this, it's time for the Soot Sponge.  And, because this is likely a tool many of you aren't familiar with (I know I wasn't) let me explain it briefly.

Soot Sponges are also referred to as Chemical Dry Cleaning Sponges.  They're thick, porous and made of rubber.  Basically, they look and feel somewhat similar to a big eraser.

Soot Sponges are used dry.  This is important:  using water or detergents--at least in this initial cleaning stage--often results in smearing the stain around.  So use the sponge dry, lightly sweeping it over the stains in even motions and in only one direction, working from top to bottom.  When you do this, the sponge will function like an eraser and will remove dust and soot from your siding.

Once the surface of your sponge has filled up, you've got a couple options.  The best option is to cut away the dirty layer with a utility life, exposing a new clean layer underneath (be careful--I speak from experience). If you prefer not to cut away the old layers, you can wash the sponge out, but you must let it dry thoroughly before using it again.

Usually, you'll be able to clean about a 12' x 20' area with one 6" sponge. 

Step 4:  Clean and Rinse

After using the Soot Sponge to remove the bulk of the smoke stain from your siding, it's finally time to hit it with Jomax House Cleaner. 

Now, Jomax is a cleaner manufactured by Zinsser and it's a great product for safely cleaning your siding and removing everything from soot residue to mold and mildew.  Using Jomax to kill mildew is more effective than just using bleach and water.  It's also safer.  While bleach is added to Jomax, the bleach activator in Jomax increases the cleaning power of the bleach while at the same time bringing down its alkalinity to levels that are safe for surrounding plants or grass. 

With that said (and because I don't want angry phone calls/e-mails), I'd still suggest spraying nearby plants and grass down with water before you apply Jomax and immediately after you've rinsed it off your house.  You know--just to be safe.

 

OK, so pick up a quart of Jomax concentrate from RepcoLite, Port City Paints or Snyder Paints and mix it according to label directions.  

 

Using a hose or a power washer, wet a section of your siding (as well as your surrounding grass and plants) and then, using a standard garden pump-up sprayer, spray the Jomax mixture onto that section of your siding and scrub it lightly with a good scrub brush.  Work from top to bottom and when you've scrubbed a section clean, go ahead and rinse it before it has a chance to dry out and leave new streaky stains.

 

Work your way around the home in this way and before long, you should have things looking good again!

The Vile Showerhead (or, Finding the Dread-Free Life)

I'm a "dreader".  That's not a word--I know that.  But that doesn't change the truth:  I dread things.  On a regular basis.

For example, I re-decorated my bathroom about a year ago.  I put wood planking on the walls, hung some wallpaper, stained and varnished new trim, installed a new (bowed) shower rod and new curtain and finally, to finish the whole thing off, I installed a new shower head.

Which was the biggest mistake I made.

See, right after installing it, my wife marched right in, closed the door and proceeded to take a 45-minute shower.  When she was done, the kids all marched through, one after the other.

When the shower marathon ended that day, I opened the bathroom door and it was as if a cloud had localized in that tiny room.  I literally couldn't see the other side through the steam.  The little ceiling fan was working overtime, but there was no way it could keep up.

"Fortunately," I thought, trying to wave away the steam, "this is something that won't happen everyday.  Once the 'newness' of the shower head wears off, we'll go back to having to fight the kids to take baths."

Nope.  Not a chance.  Every single day since the installation of that vile shower head, our bathroom is engulfed in steam.  Shower after shower, hour after hour:  steam, steam, steam. 

Well, that went on for a long time and then the inevitable happened:  the mold started growing around the edges of the ceiling.  The wallpaper started peeling and curling up on all the seams.  My beautiful bathroom had gone from a place of despair to a place of beauty and then back again to a place of despair all in about 6 months time. It was depressing to say the least. 

And that's where the "dreading" comes in.  Everyday, I'd look at the ceiling and see the mold or the wallpaper and see the peeling and I'd dread the "fix-up" job that was to come.  

I dreaded it because it seemed like such a big job:  fixing the mold, fixing the paper, repainting the ceiling.  I'd just gone through some of this work and now, thanks to that dumb shower head, I had an even bigger mess to fix.

And so I stared at it for a long time.  I thought about it.  I tried to ignore it.  But most of all I dreaded it.  

Until finally I got so sick of being depressed and frustrated about it that I actually fixed it.  

I took a week and on a Monday night, I sprayed the mold with a bleach solution and scrubbed the ceiling.  That took me exactly 17 minutes.

Two nights later I came back with more bleach--no scrubbing this time, just the bleach on the mold.  That took about 7 minutes.

On Friday night I went around the room and primed all the previously moldy spots with ProFlo Alkyd primer and then I re-pasted all the peeling paper.  That night's work took about 15 minutes.

Finally on Saturday, I got ready to paint the ceiling and finish the job.  I was ready for a big, painstaking job (I hate painting ceilings) but I was surprised to find that the whole thing took about an hour from the time I opened the can of paint to the time I put the paint back on the shelf in the workroom.

In the end, I realized that the job I'd dreaded for the last 6 months or more had taken me less than two total hours to fix.  In my mind, I'd exaggerated and inflated and imagined the work to be 10x worse than it was.  I imagined the mess, the problems to be 10x less fixable than they were.  I imagined the pain to be 10x greater than it was.

I'd spent 6 months feeling bad and frustrated and almost (in a sad and pathetic way) depressed about a room that took me less than 2 hours to fix.

So how does this apply to you?  Well, I can't speak for you, but I've talked to many folks in the paint store at RepcoLite who feel the same way I was feeling.  They're frustrated about the seemingly endless amounts of work needed in their homes.  They look at the jobs and the work to be done and assume that they're worse than they really are.  And so they do what I did:  they put them off and they stew on them, thinking about them and mulling them over in their minds for months until the jobs seem even bigger and more horrible.  In short, we dread them and waste our time worrying about them and frowning over them.

But what we really should be doing is "doing" them.  The jobs aren't as bad as we think.  They'll go smoother.  They'll go more quickly.  They won't be as painful.  And best of all, once we're done, you'll notice what I noticed:  a real sense of relief and freedom from the work that had been hanging over my head.

So, bottom line:  If you've got a project that's creating that feeling of dread, jump into it.  Get it accomplished.  And then kick back and enjoy the dread-free life...