Pressure Cleaning — Ruskin Street, Elwood

Common property is where cleaning gets deferred, because nobody owns the decision on their own. A driveway belongs to everyone and to no one. A patio behind the block is seen by whoever walks past it rather than by the person who would have to arrange the work and put it through a committee. So on most blocks the surfaces get attention once they have become a complaint. By then the growth is established in the joints and down in the pores of the concrete, it needs chemistry and dwell time rather than a pass with a machine, and it costs several times what keeping it on top of would have.

This one runs the other way round. The block is done on a cycle, so every visit starts from a surface that was clean not long ago rather than one that has been going backwards for five years. Everything hard gets done in the same visit: the driveway, the patio at the back and the paths that connect them. Doing them together matters more than it sounds. Water carries what it lifts downhill, so cleaning one surface above another that is still dirty means doing the first one twice. A day on site covers the lot, and that figure is only possible because of the interval. The same block left alone for years is a two or three day job before anyone gets to the gutters.

• Driveway, rear patio and connecting paths cleaned in one visit
• Surfaces worked in fall order so runoff never crossed finished work
• Joints cleared without being emptied out
• Scheduled with the body corporate on a cycle rather than booked ad hoc
• One attendance covering all the hard surfaces on the common property

• Driveway, patio and paths finished in a single day
• Surfaces kept on an interval instead of rescued after a complaint
• One contractor and one invoice for the committee to approve
• Same site also serviced for gutter cleaning