Decks and fences

The question that comes before the chemical

Wood is the fourth service on the menu and the last one you should learn. The surfaces are everywhere: decks, fences, hand railings, and the rest of the list. The operator course that teaches this trade is blunt about the difficulty. Its wood lesson says wood is one of the most difficult services to provide, and the instructor recommends waiting a while before venturing into it. Take that the way it is meant. Not never, and not a scare story. Wood punishes the two moves a beginner over-uses, more pressure and stronger chemical, harder than any other surface you sell, and it wears the damage in plain sight. Learn houses and driveways first. Then wood.

Every wood job starts with a question, asked before anything is mixed: "What are your plans for this deck or fence once I'm done cleaning it?" The answer is the technique. Wood arrives in three broad states, painted, stained, and bare, and what the customer plans to do afterward decides what each state allows:

| State | The customer's plan | What it allows | |---|---|---| | Painted, staying painted | "Just get the green off" | House-strength mix and your gentlest pass; preserve the coating; the deliverable is clean, not new | | Painted or stained, being redone | Repaint or restain after you | A more aggressive clean; all the growth comes off, because the coating is coming off anyway | | Bare wood | Cleaned, maybe brightened | Chemistry does the heavy lifting, adjusted to the wood's condition, with pressure kept low regardless |

That table is also the expectation conversation, and on wood it happens before you quote, not at the walkthrough. A painted deck the customer is keeping will not look like a new deck, because it is not one. Paint that was already failing shows more once the green is off. Wood showing through where the coating has worn away is wear, furniture and feet, and it was there before you arrived. The training demo in that course ends exactly there: every bit of growth gone, some old paint chipping, a customer happy because the customer asked for the green off and knew what that meant. Photograph the surface before you start, the same before-shot discipline as "The house wash, start to finish," and this conversation writes itself.

The wash, in order

The rig does not change. Same machine, same downstreamer, same chemical shelf as the house wash; that is partly why wood tempts beginners too early, because nothing on the truck says "hard." The sequence:

1. Pre-rinse everything that is not wood. Pre-wet all vegetation in and near the work area; the written SOP marks this step as very important, the same plant logic as "Pressure, gallons, and chemistry." On a deck, rinse the siding and doors nearby, because everything you do next lands on them too.
2. Apply the mix to one section at a time. Painted wood you must preserve gets the same downstreamed house mix that cleans siding; the course's demo deck was cleaned with exactly that. Weathered bare wood takes more: the fence SOP calls for a 50/50 cut of SH and water, adjusted to the condition of the wood. That is the strong end of the wood range, and it is where bleaching lives, so apply the rule you already carry: start weaker than feels necessary, and strengthen only after you watch a section turn.
3. Dwell and watch the growth discolor. The demo runs 3 to 5 minutes; the SOP caps dwell at 10 minutes, and the cap is not advisory.
4. Bring the pressure down before the nozzle touches a board. Dual-lance or adjustable wand, dialed to the point the SOP describes as strong enough to clean but not scar the wood. Then prove it on one board in a corner, every wood job, every time.
5. Clean one board at a time, in one pass. Start off the board, one smooth swipe across, end off the board. Never back and forth: starting and stopping mid-board leaves little lines in the wood where the wand dwelt.
6. Finish with a full rinse. The wood, the vegetation, and anything nearby that caught the debris the pressure lifted. A deck against a house dirties the doors; that rinse is part of the job, not a courtesy.

Brighteners, and the honest limit

Many wood jobs end with a brightener, a follow-up product that evens the wood's tone after the clean, the same even-the-tone idea as the post-treat step on flatwork. It is priced chemistry, not a free gesture, and it follows label directions, period. Keep the never-mix discipline from "Pressure, gallons, and chemistry": the chlorine rinses off and is gone before anything else touches the wood.

Then the honest limit. Taking a finish entirely off, down to bare wood for a restain, is wood restoration rather than wood cleaning, and it is a different discipline; the operator course that prices decks and fences still treats full wood restoration as its own subject. Clean and brighten as an entry operator. Refer the strip-and-restain projects until you have deliberately trained for them, and make your first wood jobs the painted green-off kind, where expectations are simplest and the technique is most forgiving.

Pricing wood

Wood prices like everything else you sell. Measure the surface and quote per square foot, and where the surface is a deck, quote inside the deck band instead of the wide general one. The contractor survey "The honest money" cites puts decks at $0.30 to $0.80 per square foot, carries a deck or patio flat rate of $200 to $500 and up, and prices fences by the linear foot at $1 to $6 (HomeGuide). Survey bands, not local prices. Adjust on the usual axes, condition, complexity, and your actual hours, and let the wide general band catch anything the deck band does not fit. Two lines on the estimate are wood's own. First, the chemistry: wood cleaners and brighteners are their own cost, and the operator course that teaches estimating says to price them in, not absorb them. Second, the pace: one pass per board, board by board, is slower than it looks, and slow is billable. The minimum charge applies like anywhere else, because a small fence still eats the first slot of the morning. And decks ride along with house work naturally; the deck off the back of the house you just washed is the easiest upsell conversation on the property, offered once, without pressure.

That is the fourth service on the menu, and three of the four are now taught. The craft section has one stop left.