Exterior cleaning in Blandford Forum

Painted and rendered frontages. A great many Blandford fronts are rendered and painted, and paint is the surface you are cleaning, not the wall behind it. It gets soft washed at low pressure with a biocide, working top down, so the algae and its spores die rather than being driven into the coating and returning as regrowth by the spring. A jet wash here does real damage and strips paint off in sheets. Where the paint is already blown or flaking, washing it will take it off, and we would rather show you that at the site visit and quote for the sound elevations only.

Old brickwork. Nearly a fifth of the town predates 1919. The brick is soft and the joints are lime, and the two together are the easiest surface in Dorset to ruin with a machine. No lance, no turbo nozzle, nothing that would move mortar. Low pressure, a treatment, and time. If the pointing has already gone we say so and stop, because a clean before repointing is money spent twice.

Roofs are plain clay tile and slate on the older stock, concrete interlocking and pebbledash gables on the post war and 1970s housing round the edges of the town. Moss is scraped off by hand, the laps and the ridge cleared, and the slope treated. Clearing the valley between two slopes is often what stops the leak somebody rang about in the first place. With 31.1% of the town terraced, a roof frequently runs on over several houses, and we say plainly that cleaning one length is short lived unless the neighbours come in on it.

Gutters, parapets and downpipes. Older Blandford buildings often drain behind a parapet or into a shared run rather than off an open eaves, and a blocked outlet up there shows as a damp patch inside long before anybody sees it from the pavement. We clear by hand, check the outlets and the joints, and photograph what is up there so you can see it for yourself. Nearly a quarter of the town is flats, so on a converted front that photograph is often what an agent or a residents' company actually needs.

A lot of the town fronts straight onto the pavement, so a clean here is as much about protection as pressure. Doorways, shopfronts and planting get sheeted, the drain and the gully get covered, and the run off is controlled rather than left to find the road, which is what pollution prevention guidance asks of us. We use only products approved for the surface and work to the label, as the biocides regime the HSE administers requires. Where the street is busy we work early, and that is the honest reason a town centre elevation takes the time it does.

On the estate housing at the edges that means block paving cleaned and re-sanded, and slabbed patios lifted out of moss and lichen. In the town it is more often a back yard, a passage or a set of steps, done by hand with the water managed, and a survey of a town yard nearly always turns up a gully nobody has lifted in years.

In the town the street decides more of the price than the elevation does. A terrace fronting straight onto the pavement wants a tower and the footway managed, a flat above a shop only ever reaches its own elevation, and a detached house on the edge of town comes off a pole from its own garden. The work at height rules and the pavement together set the access, and how long it has to stand matters as much as what it is. Ask whether the protection and the early start are inside the price or added to it later.

We are out to Blandford Forum and the DT11 villages regularly, working the town itself along with Bryanston, Blandford St Mary, Stourpaine and the lanes off the A354. Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, which you can look up in a minute. Thomas Hannen's business, and he is the one who comes out to price the job, not a salesman. A verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The visit and the written quote are both free.