Exterior cleaning in Sanford
Sanford borders the southern shoreline of Lake Monroe, the 9,406-acre lake the St. Johns River runs through, and the City says it is known for its brick-lined streets and towering oaks. What changes the work is that Sanford is two housing stocks under one name. The Census puts the median Sanford home at 1994 against Seminole County's 1988, margins not overlapping, so the city is the newer. Yet 5.5 percent of Sanford's units date from 1939 or earlier against 1.2 percent county-wide — about four and a half times the county rate, and those intervals do not come close to overlapping. Sum the Census's own post-2000 categories and roughly 42 percent of Sanford units are from 2000 or later, against 28 percent county-wide. Both ends heavy, middle thin: that is why the medians invert. Sanford is also less single-family than its county, 51.6 percent detached against 61.4.
A city code that names surface cleaning, and calls the wrong kind unlawful
Sanford has four local historic districts — Downtown Commercial, created by ordinance in 1985; Sanford Residential, 1993, originally the Old Sanford District; Sanford Avenue and Georgetown Residential, both 2023 — all regulated by Schedule S of the City's Land Development Regulations. Plenty of Florida towns ask for care around old buildings. Sanford puts the consequence in the code: blasting a structure with pulverized materials, glass beads or other solids, "with or without water", is "prohibited and unlawful", and so is failing to clean historic masonry by the gentlest method possible — the code's own example is water, detergents and bristle brushes. The City also requires a Certificate of Appropriateness before any exterior work, including repairs, in the Downtown Commercial, Sanford Avenue and Residential districts. Whether a wash counts as that work, the text we have read does not answer either way. The Historic Preservation Officer can answer it; ask there rather than take this page's word.
What the nomination form says the walls are
The Sanford Residential Historic District joined the National Register in December 1989 with 434 contributing buildings and 69 noncontributing, about 86 percent, over a period of significance of 1880 to 1933. Most houses in it are two story frame houses, most carry "wood shingles, drop siding, or clapboard siding", and the churches and schools are brick. The City ordinance adds that horizontal wood siding is the predominant exterior finish there, alongside masonry of brick, tile, stucco, coquina and concrete block. The nomination also records what has been done since: porches enclosed or screened, aluminum or asbestos siding applied over the original. Coquina, asbestos-cement board and hundred-year-old painted clapboard have three different tolerances, and on a house resurfaced once already, working out which one is in front of you is the job before the job.
Downtown is brick because it burned
On 22 September 1887 fire took four blocks of the commercial district. The National Register nomination records that the most densely built part of town, between Magnolia and Sanford Avenues, was wood apart from the Hotchkiss Block, and that the destruction was total. "After the fire new construction was entirely of brick." The 1976 nomination then walks the street and keeps finding that brick hidden: "a light coating of stucco covers the brick" on one, another with a facade under stucco so thick that none of the original brickwork can be seen. So a storefront downtown may be brick, painted brick, stucco over brick, or stucco over brick painted later, and those four do not behave alike wet. Schedule S adds that masonry left unpainted shall generally stay unpainted — painting it is appropriate only in some circumstances, and only with the Board's approval.
In the historic districts, rust on a metal roof is evidence of a nuisance
Schedule S, which governs the four historic districts, is direct about metal: it is "prima facie evidence of a nuisance for a roof to show evidence of significant deterioration (such as rust or other corrosion)", and "prohibited and unlawful to allow a metal roof to be in a nuisance condition". The metal it permits is standing seam, stamped metal shingle, full corrugated and 5V crimp — and 5-V crimped metal is one of the materials the 1989 nomination says replaced original metal shingle and wood shake roofs on many buildings in the district, alongside composition, asphalt or fiberglass shingles. Section 11.0 says the same of the building underneath, naming crumbling plaster or mortar and ineffective waterproofing of walls, roofs and foundations among the ways an owner may not let a structure fall into disrepair. Two qualifiers: that is a finding the seven-member Historic Preservation Board makes at its third-Wednesday meeting, not something automatic; and washing is not repair, because taking the streaks off a corroding panel changes what you see, not what the metal is doing.
Where the City has reclaimed water, potable water is off the irrigation list
Where the City has made reclaimed water available it has disallowed potable water for irrigation, and every new development in the service area must irrigate from the lowest-quality water available — reclaimed, a shallow or brackish well, surface water or storm water — on its own meter. The watering-day rules the City adopted from the St. Johns River Water Management District in April 2010 allow one day a week in winter and two in summer, and the City states plainly that this does not apply to reclaimed water. A wall inside the arc of a reclaimed head is therefore wetted on more days than that calendar suggests, and whether a property is on reclaimed at all is the City's record, not ours.
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