Today we bought special cement stain, and borrowed a high-pressure water spray-gun from a friend. This puts out water at a rate about half of the professional spray-guns (which you can rent from Home Depot), but the friend said it was perfectly adequate for cleaning moss and dirt off steps before staining them.
It works like a charm -- pull the trigger, point and spray. And the dirt disappears as if you were spray-painting Clean all over it.
We are left now with a clean step and front walk. And the discovery that it wasn't a cement slip, after all, but paint that the church slapped on before selling the house. So we aren't sure the stain is going to work -- but it is not returnable, so we'll try it before anything else. One option is to rent a professional spray-gun and shoot the paint off -- even the spray-gun we have, given time to work its magic, will push off the paint. Whatever we do, we have to do it soon -- the walk and steps look horrible -- pallid gray with patches where the paint has pulled off. The dirty steps were at least a rather warm and homogeneous brown.
Another use for the spray-gun is the pathway bricks. It turns out that the sprayer melts the mortar off the bricks like butter. So I spent a very fun hour this afternoon shooting off mortar, cleaning 80% of the bricks in the time it would have taken me to scrape 5% of them (and more thoroughly than by hand).
1 comment:
Now I want to rent a high-pressure sprayer but I'm not sure what to use it on. Maybe the shingle siding.
Have you seen the wonderful epoxy concrete paint/coatings? They come in lots of colors and have a colored undercoat, then you sprinkle a multi-colored spatter effect on them, then overcoat the whole thing with a clear sealer. They look really great. I see dieplays for this paint at every Home Depot I go into, plus there are ads on hgtv.
If the concrete stain doesn't work, you could try this stuff in a color to go with the new porch floor.
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