House washing and pressure washing inFort Worth

Brick made before roughly 1930 was fired at lower temperatures and is considerably softer than what comes off a modern line. It was laid up with lime mortar, which is softer still — by design, so the mortar sacrifices itself instead of the brick. Point a pressure washer at that assembly and you will pull mortar out of the joints and take the fired face off the brick, and neither one grows back.

This is the most common form of preventable damage we see in Fort Worth, and it is almost always the result of someone treating a 1930 Monticello house like a 2010 Keller house. Historic masonry gets the gentlest chemistry we have and essentially no pressure at all.

Original stucco needs the same restraint. On a nearly hundred-year-old Tudor in Berkeley Place or Ryan Place, the finish coat has been through a century of thermal cycling, and it will let go if you push it. On these homes we deliberately accept a slightly slower, more conservative clean — the goal is a house that looks its age well, not a house stripped back to something it never was.

North Fort Worth is the opposite job entirely: newer brick and Hardie board, construction dust from the Alliance build-out, and driveways doing battle with clay. Those homes we can work considerably more directly.