Driveway & Patio Cleaning in Sherwood Rise

Driveway & Patio Cleaning for Sherwood Rise homes

There is no drive. The hard surface here is the flight of stone steps from the pavement to a door five households share, the small paved landing at the top of them, and a slope that sends the dirty water downhill onto somebody else's ground.

The surface in question is nearly always the approach rather than a drive, and the approach is common ground. A flight of stone steps up from the pavement, a path, a landing at the front door, a standing for the bins. Every household walks the whole of it and not one of them owns any of it, so a resident who wants it cleaned has to take a written quote to whoever holds the building rather than book a date. Steps on a shaded frontage grow algae faster than anything else on the property, and they are the one surface where dirt is a footing problem rather than an appearance problem. That is also why the pressure matters. Worn stone cleaned too hard comes up bright and comes up smooth, which is the opposite of what a step needs.

Sherwood Rise sits in NG7, under Nottingham City Council. End of tenancy work dominates, because a converted villa holds four or five tenancies and each one ends on its own date. Landlords book a deep clean when a flat has turned over several times without one. Regular domestic work is smaller flats on a fortnightly slot, plus a monthly pass on the common stairs.

What we run into on Sherwood Rise driveway & patio cleaning jobs

The treads are worn hollow through the middle, which is what a century of the same route does to stone, and a hollow tread holds water long after the rest of the flight has dried. That is why the middle of each step is greener than its edges. There is usually an iron handrail standard bedded into the stone with lead, and around each socket the iron has rusted and bled a brown halo into the surface which no wash will remove, because the staining is inside the stone. At the foot of the flight there is a gully, and it is nearly always silted level with grit washed off the slope. Clearing that is the first thing we do.

How a Sherwood Rise driveway & patio cleaning job actually runs

Two constraints here that a house with a drive never has. The first is water. A pressure washer wants a continuous supply, and a converted villa has one outside tap or none, so the hose comes off a tap inside a ground floor flat and runs out through the door. That flat is not necessarily the one paying for the work, so that gets agreed with the resident beforehand rather than on the morning. The second is that the steps are the only way in and out of the building. They cannot be closed for half a day while five households come and go, so the flight is done in halves, one side kept walkable and marked off, the wet half left until the first is safe again. That takes longer than a single pass and is not negotiable. Aim for a dry spell in spring, when the winter growth is at its worst and the stone has a chance of drying afterwards. Tell us where the bins should stand while we work, and put a note through the doors the day before, because a resident stepping onto a wet tread unwarned is the thing you were trying to prevent.

Who books it here

The housing here is mostly large three storey Victorian villas and bay fronted semis on the slope, most of them long since divided into self contained flats, with a run of smaller terraces at the lower end, and that is what shapes this job more than the floor area does.

We run Sherwood Rise on the same round as Carrington, Forest Fields and New Basford.

What we check on every Sherwood Rise job

The bin standing is the dirtiest square metre on the property and the one nobody mentions when asking for a price. Five flats means a row of wheelie bins on whatever paving replaced the front garden, they are dragged out to the kerb and back along the same line every week, and what seeps from the bottom of a bin is not surface dirt. It soaks into the joints and into the face of a porous flag, and it leaves a dark rectangle exactly the size of the bin that is still there when everything around it has come up clean. That responds to a degreaser and dwell time rather than to more pressure, and on a soft flag it will lighten rather than clear. The same corner carries the thickest moss, because a bin sitting on paving keeps it permanently shaded and permanently damp. Shifting the bins along by a couple of feet afterwards does more for the following year than any machine can.

What the driveway & patio cleaning covers

A sample of what is included

• The clean: Oil, tyre scuff and leaf tannin staining worked separately, since they are chemistry problems rather than soil
• The clean: Lance work confined to edges, kerb lines, steps and the corners a rotary physically cannot reach
• Before the water goes on: A test patch in a low visibility corner on any stone we have not worked on before
• Before the water goes on: Established weeds, roots and thick moss pulled and scraped out of the joints by hand first

That is a sample rather than the whole list. The full driveway & patio cleaning page sets out every section of the scope, what is deliberately excluded and why, how long it takes on each property size, and what tends to go wrong.