Exterior cleaning in Orlando
Orlando is not a bigger version of the towns around it, and the difference starts with who owns the wall. Inside the city limits detached houses are a minority of the stock and nearly half of it sits in buildings of five or more units. The same city holds an outsized share of Orange County's oldest buildings, six historic preservation overlay districts, and a code that says out loud how a historic wall may be cleaned.
Almost half the units are in buildings of five or more
The two ends of Orlando's housing stock pull in opposite directions. Of the city's 148,754 units, 47,076 are single-family detached — 31.6 percent, against a little over half for Orange County. At the other end, 74,006 units, or 49.8 percent, sit in buildings of five or more, where the county figure is 29.9 percent. One exterior type is effectively absent here: the Census finds 364 mobile homes in all of Orlando, a quarter of one percent, on a count small enough that its own margin is wide; Orange County is at 3.1 percent. Another 14,374 units are single-family attached, which is a shared wall on a smaller scale. On a shared building the sequence and the method are worth settling before anything starts.
Where Orange County keeps its old buildings
What describes Orlando as a whole is pulled forward by everything built in the last twenty-five years, so the useful figure is the tail. The Census counts 3,846 city housing units built in 1939 or earlier: 2.6 percent of Orlando's stock against 1.5 percent across Orange County. Turned around, the city holds just over a quarter of the county's housing units and close to 45 percent of everything in the county built before 1940. Extend the line to 1960 and 13.3 percent of Orlando's stock predates it, against 8.9 percent county-wide. That is a real body of old stock, not a handful of survivors, sitting in a city where most of what surrounds it is far newer — and a wall from the 1920s and a wall from the 2010s are not the same substrate under the same colour of paint.
Six overlay districts, and a code that names surface cleaning
Orlando has six historic preservation overlay districts: Downtown (1980), Lake Cherokee (1981), Lake Copeland (1984), Lake Eola Heights (1989), Lake Lawsona (1994) and Colonialtown South (2000). The City's code addresses cleaning by name. Among the standards the Historic Preservation Board applies: the surface cleaning of structures shall be undertaken with the gentlest means possible, and sandblasting and other cleaning methods that could damage the historic building materials shall be discouraged. The design standards for the districts go further, and they split by material. On wood siding, trim or detailing they prohibit sandblasting or the use of any abrasive, corrosive or damaging technique. On masonry they prohibit the same and then spell out what it covers: blasting with pulverized materials, glass beads or other solids, with or without water. Read that last phrase twice, because on masonry it puts wet abrasive blasting inside the prohibition rather than outside it. The stated purpose of those standards covers all maintenance, not only alterations. What needs a Certificate of Appropriateness is the Board's call, not ours — but the standard your wall is held to is already written down.
Two districts whose walls are on paper
Two Orlando districts have National Register nomination forms that record materials, and the National Register list is not the City's overlay list: Lake Eola Heights carries both names, while Holden–Parramore is a National Register district and is not one of the six overlays. Lake Eola Heights, listed in January 1992, covers 120 acres immediately east of downtown: 662 buildings, 487 contributing, built between about 1890 and 1940. The form gives brick pier foundations, wood weatherboard walls and asphalt roofs, calls wood, brick and stucco common construction materials, and notes that while asphalt shingles roof most houses, original pressed metal shingles, asbestos shingle and V-crimp metal sheeting survive on a number of residences. Holden–Parramore, listed in September 2009, is about 20 acres and 106 buildings from roughly 1921 to 1953: concrete foundations, brick and wood walls, tar-and-gravel roofs, most single-family dwellings Frame Vernacular or Masonry Vernacular in style, the primary materials wood, brick and concrete, the last often finished in stucco. Among the frame houses, horizontal weatherboard and drop siding are the most common wall materials, and asbestos shingles are common on post-1930s work or as resurfacing over something older.
OUC water in, drainage wells out
OUC supplies water to residents and businesses within the City of Orlando and to portions of Orange County, drawn from the Lower Floridan Aquifer, at a published average hardness of 129 parts per million. USGS classes that as hard, which sounds like the start of a sales pitch, so here is the rest: UF/IFAS puts the desired range at 50 to 150 parts per million and links deposits to water above 300. Nobody should sell you a mineral treatment on the strength of Orlando's water hardness. The other direction matters more. The City's comprehensive plan says its roughly 120 lakes are the ultimate discharge point for about 90 percent of stormwater runoff, and that Orlando has approximately 150 drainage wells sending stormwater directly into the upper Floridan aquifer, a number of them taking it straight from City streets. That water, the plan says, carries all of the associated pollution from roadway and urban development and can reach the potable source in the lower Floridan. The same plan, citing a 1982 study, estimates that 40 percent of the total aquifer recharge in the Orlando core area comes from those wells. That is a short path from pavement to drinking water, and the City is the one saying so.
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