Serving Clients Since 1977
Power Washing in Waterbury, CT
Gagnon Painting & Decorating has completed thousands of jobs safely since 1977, and we use state-of-the-art equipment to blast away grit, grime and contaminants. In Waterbury, where nearly a third of the housing predates 1940, the skill in power washing is knowing how much pressure a surface can take — and where to stop.
We do not strip paint with pressure washing. That is a deliberate limit, not a shortcoming.
Why is pressure the wrong tool for old Waterbury wood?
Because the surfaces worth protecting here are exactly the ones pressure destroys. About 15,395 of Waterbury's homes were built before 1940 — 30.8% of the stock, the highest pre-1940 share of any town we serve. A great deal of that is wood: clapboard, shingle courses, turned porch columns, and on the Queen Anne triple-deckers and the Hillside district houses, scroll-sawn bracket work that no supplier can match today.
Water at high pressure does three things to that fabric. It drives moisture behind siding where it has no route out. It raises and furs the grain on softwood so the next coat sits on a rough, thirsty surface. And on decorative millwork it simply removes material — slowly, invisibly during the job, and permanently.
So washing, for us, is a cleaning step ahead of a coating step. It removes what would stop paint bonding. Failing paint comes off afterwards by hand and tool, at the pace the substrate allows.
Housing figures: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2020-2024 five-year estimates.
Waterbury power washing questions
Can you wash a three-story triple-decker?
Yes. Waterbury has an unusually large multi-family stock — about 17.6% of housing units sit in two-to-four unit buildings — and three full stories with tiered porches is routine work here. The considerations are access, protecting the porch detail on the lower tiers, and controlling where the water goes on a dense city lot where your neighbor's siding may be a few feet away.
Will washing alone make my house look repainted?
Sometimes, and that is worth knowing before you spend money on paint. A house that is structurally sound but simply dirty — atmospheric grime, mildew on the shaded elevations, pollen — can come back a long way from a wash alone. A house whose paint is genuinely failing will look worse after washing, because the wash reveals the failure rather than causing it. We will tell you which one you have.
Do you do mold testing or remediation?
No. We do not perform mold or fungi testing, abatement, remediation or air sampling, and we will say so plainly rather than take the work. Washing visible surface mildew off an exterior is ordinary cleaning; a genuine mold problem inside a building envelope is a different trade and you want a specialist, not a painter.
Need a wash before the paint goes on?
Call for a free estimate and a written summary quote on your first visit.