The six lines a complete scope states
- Each surface, and what it is made of
- Photos of the worst areas, not the best
- The water source, and whether it works
- Where run-off drains, and onto what
- Access windows, gates, parking and notice
- What is explicitly excluded
Surface material is the line most scopes leave out, and it is the one that changes both the method and the price the most. Concrete flatwork wants pressure and heat. Limestone, stucco, painted siding and wood do not — pressure erodes soft stone and strips coatings, so those surfaces are soft washed at roughly garden-hose pressure with dwell time doing the work instead of force. A scope that says “wash the exterior” without naming the materials has not yet decided which of those two jobs it is buying, which is why estate exterior washing and limestone cleaning are quoted as separate scopes from washing commercial hardscape.
Why two bids on the same property can differ by three times
Two honest contractors can price the same lot very differently, because they are not bidding the same job. The gaps, in roughly the order they cost you money:
- Hot water or cold. Grease and oil do not lift with cold water — it spreads them outward into a gray halo and drives them into the pores. Hot water with a degreaser and dwell time is a different machine and a longer visit.
- One pass, or pre-treat and dwell. A surface cleaner run once over a stained pad looks better without being clean. Pre-treating, letting the solution work and then rinsing is the version that lasts.
- What is included at the edges. Dumpster pads, grease alleys, the back door and the curb line are the areas most often left out of a low bid, and most often the reason the property still looks dirty afterwards.
- Furniture, fixtures and signage. Moved and washed, or worked around. Those are different day lengths.
- Who supplies water, and how run-off is recovered. A site with no usable hose bib means a tank and refills, and recovering wash water is real time on the clock.
- How many visits it takes. The first wash of a surface that has never been cleaned is a restoration visit, not the maintenance visit after it. A bid pricing them identically has guessed wrong on one.
None of that makes the cheap bid dishonest — it makes it a different scope. Normalize the six lines above and the numbers usually converge.
Photograph the worst areas, not the best
The instinct is to send the photos the property looks good in. Those are exactly the photos that produce a bid which changes on arrival. Send the corner of the pad nobody looks at, the drive lane where the oil is, the stain you have stopped noticing, and anything you do not want touched — signage, up-lighting, planting beds, a threshold that already leaks. Include one wide shot per area: a close-up on its own gives no indication of whether a stain is four feet across or forty, and area is most of the estimate.
Water, and where it goes afterwards
These are two separate questions, and buyers usually ask only the first.
Where the water comes from. A hose bib on the building, whether it works, what pressure it delivers, and whether it is on a meter someone is watching. Some downtown sites have no usable exterior tap at all, which means a tank and a night planned around refills.
Where the water goes. Rain is allowed to enter a storm drain. Wash water carrying oil, grease or detergent is not rain, and a storm system discharges to a creek rather than to a treatment plant — so it has to be contained, blocked at the inlet and recovered, or routed to a landscaped area that can absorb it. The obligation follows the property rather than the contractor, which is a good reason to ask how a bidder handles it before they are on site. The commercial pressure washing pillar covers how that is managed on hardscape in full.
Access is the schedule
Yes, insured. Certificates of insurance available on request.
Then the deadline behind the deadline. A surface still wet when the doors open is a failed job rather than a finished one, so the real window is not “overnight” — it is the time between the last person leaving and the first arriving, minus drying. Weather takes a bite out of that too; you do not start a wash ahead of a front.
The line that prevents the argument: what is excluded
The most valuable line in an exterior scope is the one listing what is not included, and it is the line almost nobody writes down. These are stated up front on every scope we issue:
- No hoods, ducts or exhaust systems. That is certified NFPA 96 work and we refer it to certified partners. On a restaurant we wash what the exhaust lands on, not the exhaust.
- No sealing, striping, resurfacing or repair. Washing reveals cracking, spalling and faded striping. It does not fix any of them.
- No stain guaranteed before we have seen it. Oil soaked into porous concrete for years is below the surface, not on it, and can ghost back as it wicks up.
- Rust, efflorescence, etching, acid damage and failed sealer are not soil. They do not wash off, and they are separate problems with separate fixes.
- No published per-square-foot rate. Every property is quoted in writing after a walkthrough.
Put two bids on the same job before you compare the numbers
Knowing why bids differ does not by itself tell you which one to take. The move that works is
not comparing two proposals side by side — it is refusing to compare them until they describe the
same job. Two proposals written by two companies are two different documents answering two different
questions. Normalizing them is four requests, and every one of them is reasonable to ask for.
Four requests that make two exterior bids comparable
| What to ask for |
What it exposes |
What to do with the answer |
| Rebid off one document — yours |
Send every bidder the same surface list, the same photos and the same access notes, and ask them to price that. Anything they add is a real difference of opinion about the property; anything they leave out is a gap you now know about. |
This is the single highest-value step and it costs one email. The checklist below is the document. |
| A price per area, not one number |
Where the money actually sits. A lot, a dumpster pad, a sidewalk run and a facade are four different jobs at four different rates, and one lump sum hides which of them a bidder is treating as an afterthought. |
Compare like areas across bids. You may well find one company is sharpest on pavement and another on the building. |
| First visit and maintenance visit priced separately |
Whether the bidder understands the property has never been washed. A single number covering both means one of the two is wrong, and it is usually the first one. |
Budget the restoration visit once, then compare the recurring numbers — that is the figure you will actually live with. |
| Exclusions in their own words |
What each bidder thinks they are not doing. Handed a blank page instead of a checkbox, a low bid and a high bid tend to write very different lists. |
Read the exclusions before the price. The cheaper number is often a shorter list of work, not a better rate. |
One more question worth asking, because it is the unit sitting underneath every one of these numbers:
how many people, for how many hours, on how many visits? Exterior washing is largely time on
site, so crew size and duration reconcile a surprising number of gaps on their own. If two bids are far
apart and the hours are nearly the same, the difference is equipment and chemistry. If the hours are far
apart, the difference is scope, and one of the two has not seen something the other has.
Before the truck arrives: what the property has to do
The information checklist below is what a bidder needs to quote. This is the shorter list of things that
have to physically happen on site before a crew can start, and any one of them can cut a
booked night short:
- Clear and hold the area. Vehicles moved off the surfaces being washed and kept off — a lot half-full at 11pm is a lot that gets washed in patches. Agree who cones it and who is authorized to have a car towed or left.
- Furniture, mats, planters and A-boards. Moved by you, moved by the crew as billed time, or worked around. Any of the three is fine; the unagreed version is what costs you a section of patio.
- Irrigation off for the night. Sprinklers running onto a surface mid-wash or onto a drying one undo the visit, and on a soft-washed elevation they dilute the solution before it has done anything.
- Doors, windows and any threshold you already know leaks. Tell the crew about it rather than letting them find it. Water finds a bad seal faster than rain does.
- Exterior power, low-voltage lighting and anything already damaged. Open boxes, loose covers, up-lights and exposed wiring get flagged and avoided — and photographed before, not after.
- Point at the storm inlets. You know where they are; a crew arriving in the dark does not. This is the detail that decides whether run-off is managed or discovered.
- Empty the dumpster before, not after. Washing a pad under a full container is washing three sides of it.
- Send tenant and neighbor notice. Machines are loud at 2am. One notice prevents the complaint that ends a recurring schedule.
What “done” looks like, and when to look at it
Almost every dispute about exterior washing is really a disagreement about what finished means, and most
of them start because the property was inspected at the wrong moment. Everything looks clean wet. A surface
that is still dark from water tells you nothing at all, which is why a walkthrough held while the crew is
packing up is the least informative one available.
Look when it is dry, in flat light, from where people actually see it. Overcast or
mid-morning, not low-angle sun — raked light exaggerates every texture the surface had before anyone
washed it and will convince you of stripes that are not there. Stand at the approach first, at the distance
a customer sees the property from, and only then walk in close. Most of us do the reverse, and a close
inspection of a good wash will usually find something.
Uniformity is the test, not brightness. A washed surface should be evenly one color, and
the specific things worth looking for are all patterns rather than dirt:
- Stripes or a zebra pattern across flatwork — a wand moved too fast or overlapped
unevenly. Legitimate to raise.
- A clean square, or a clean line where the work stopped. Usually a surface-cleaner path
that was not carried to a natural edge. Also legitimate, and easy to fix on the same visit if you catch it
before the crew leaves.
- A gray halo spreading out from where oil used to be. That is oil driven outward rather
than lifted — the cold-water result described above — and it is a method problem, not a
coverage one.
- A bright or rough patch that is lighter than everything around it. Pressure has taken
material off. On concrete that is cosmetic; on limestone, stucco, wood or paint it is damage, and it is the
reason those surfaces are soft washed instead.
- An even, overall shade that is simply darker than you hoped. That may well be the color
of the material itself, which nobody has seen for years.
Then the question that decides whether something is a callback: is it soil, or is it in the
material? Soil that survived a wash is ours to come back for. Rust, efflorescence, etching, acid
damage, failed sealer and oil that has soaked years deep into porous concrete are not soil, will not come off
with any amount of pressure, and are covered above under exclusions for exactly this reason. A contractor who
agrees everything is a callback is a contractor who will eventually stop answering the phone.
Re-check at forty-eight hours, and expect two things to change. A white bloom can surface
on masonry and pavers as trapped moisture carries salts up and evaporates — that is efflorescence
arriving, not the wash failing, and it usually keeps returning until the surface has fully dried out. Deep
oil can wick back toward the surface and leave a ghost of the original stain. Both are worth photographing
and worth raising, but neither is redoing the visit.
Photograph it properly, or the photos prove nothing. Before and after shots have to be
taken from the same position, at roughly the same time of day, and in the same light. A before shot in raked
afternoon sun against an after shot on an overcast morning is a comparison of two lighting conditions. We
document the work either way; a property keeping its own record is worth more at the point where a landlord,
a tenant or a buyer asks what was done.