Outdoor furniture in New Jersey gets destroyed by winter. Snow piles up on cushions. Ice cracks plastic parts. Wind rips tarps loose until they’re flapping around the yard like flags. Come spring, that patio set needs serious work or outright replacement. Shrink wrap fixes most of these problems. It creates a tight seal that keeps…
I stared at my deck last April and felt guilty. The wood was gray and weathered. Splinters everywhere. Whatever stain we’d put on three years before was basically gone. I told myself I’d fix it, then summer arrived and we were grilling out there twice a week and I wasn’t about to shut down the…
Woke up two winters ago to water dripping from my bedroom ceiling. In the middle of January. Thought my roof was shot. Nope. Ice dam. Caused by gutters I’d been putting off cleaning since October. That little bit of procrastination cost me $3,200 in repairs. What the Hell Is an Ice Dam Anyway? Had no…
My deck was embarrassing. I kept putting off doing anything about it because I figured it would cost a fortune to fix. The wood had turned this ugly gray color and there was green stuff growing in between the boards. My wife kept hinting that maybe we should do something about it, and I kept…
My house looked like garbage last spring. I’m not exaggerating – the vinyl siding was green with mold, my driveway had black streaks all over it, and my deck looked like it hadn’t been touched in ten years. My wife kept dropping hints about how nice the neighbors’ houses looked after they got them power…
Look, I’ve been getting asked about this constantly, and honestly, most people have no clue there’s even a difference. They use these terms like they mean the same thing, then wonder why their driveway still looks terrible after spending a weekend with a rented pressure washer. It’s All About the Hot Water The whole thing…
My driveway looked like a crime scene last March. White streaks everywhere, chunks of concrete flaking off like dandruff, and these weird crystalline formations growing from cracks I swear weren’t there in November. My neighbor Pete walked by and said, “First winter with a new driveway, huh? You gotta power wash it!” Turns out, that…
I never thought much about power washing until last spring when my neighbor Dave transformed his 15-year-old brick patio from a sad, greenish-black surface into what looked like brand new construction. “Just saved myself $9,000 on replacement,” he grinned, hosing down his power washer. That conversation completely changed how I view exterior cleaning – not…
I still remember the look on my face when my home inspector pointed to the north side of my roof and said, “That’s not a shadow—that’s alive and eating your shingles.” After dropping some serious cash on my first home, discovering that microscopic organisms were literally consuming my investment wasn’t exactly welcome news. Turns out,…
I still remember the look on my neighbor Mark’s face last April when he saw the difference between our homes. We’d both endured the same Monmouth County winter—the relentless nor’easters, the mid-January ice storm that left Howell without power for three days, and that bizarre late-February sleet that seemed to hit our neighborhood harder than…