Exterior cleaning in Lakeland
We clean the outside of buildings and the concrete around them across Polk County, Lakeland included. Here is what is different about the work here.
Lake water, sprinklers, and the orange streak on the wall
The City of Lakeland counts 38 named lakes inside its limits, from Lake Blanton at 2.5 acres to Lake Parker at 2,272. Where irrigation draws from a well, the water can carry iron: the University of Florida’s extension service says most Florida well water is high in iron. Iron leaves a rust-orange stain wherever a sprinkler head throws against a wall, a driveway edge or a fence panel. It is a different stain from algae and it does not come off the same way — soap and pressure will not touch it, and the wrong acid on the wrong surface will etch it. The fix that actually lasts is not chemical anyway: it is moving or re-aiming the head that is causing it, so tell us which heads reach the wall and which days they run.
Seven historic districts, and what they are actually made of
Lakeland has seven historic districts, all of them on the National Register, and their nomination papers are unusually useful to somebody who cleans buildings for a living, because they record what the walls are. Dixieland’s contributing buildings went up between about 1905 and 1940 and are overwhelmingly wood — weatherboard, drop siding and wood shingle on brick piers, under asphalt shingle roofs. South Lake Morton is 62 percent bungalow. Lake Hunter Terrace is mostly concrete block, painted or stuccoed, with some asbestos shingle siding. Biltmore–Cumberland runs to horizontal wood siding and stucco with composite asbestos panels. Those are four different jobs. Painted wood a century old does not take the pressure that new stucco shrugs off, and asbestos-cement siding is a surface you do not aggressively abrade at all. Knowing which one you have before the trigger is pulled is where the work starts.
Older housing than the county's, by the numbers
This is not an impression, it is in the Census. The median Lakeland home was built in 1983; across Polk County as a whole it is 1992. Nearly six in a hundred Lakeland homes date from 1939 or earlier. Roughly one in seven housing units here is a mobile home, which is a different exterior again — metal or vinyl skirting, aluminium awnings, and panels that dent under a wand held too close. Older buildings are not harder to clean, but they are less forgiving of being cleaned wrongly: coatings have been layered on and are failing in places, and sealants have gone brittle. So looking comes first and the quote second, and some surfaces are better left alone than washed into a patchy wall.
A canopy city, and why that is the thing that decides how long a wash lasts
Lakeland has been a Tree City USA for twenty-one years running, and the City looks after more than fifty-six thousand public trees covering something like five hundred and ninety acres of canopy. Live oak and laurel oak are among the most common, and a southern live oak can carry a crown sixty to a hundred and twenty feet across. That is a lot of deep shade, and shade is not a cosmetic detail here: it holds moisture, cuts air movement, and keeps a surface damp for hours after a sunny one has dried. Growth follows the wet. So on a shaded street the north wall, the shaded roof slope and the driveway under the canopy will green up again well before the rest of the property does. It is worth knowing before you decide what a clean is worth, and trimming what overhangs takes away the shade that keeps a surface damp.
The I-4 freight side of town
Lakeland sits on the I-4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando, and the north side of town is warehousing and distribution rather than housing. That is a different kind of exterior work on a different schedule: loading-dock aprons that collect tyre rubber and hydraulic drips, truck-court concrete, and tractor units that need washing on a route rather than one at a time. If that work repeats on your site, ask us about a schedule rather than a single visit.
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