[Progress.160] Having fun with Blocks/Paving cleaning

The big garden blocks looks great in our backyard, but after moved in almost 2 years, recently we having been quite annoyed about the dirts all around it. Here's a photo of the stairs area, the dirts are on the capping, under the steps, ...etc everywhere!

A closer look shows all the dirty black things all over the place. we tried scrapping, brushing, ...etc but none of them seem to work as expected. One of our neighbours used these blocks for the fence at the front of their house, and as they probably haven't wash it for years it looks really ugly!

Someone told us about spraying some chemicals to remove it, but we were not really sure if that's a good idea. What if it just changed colour with the dirts still remained there??

Then a quick chat with our builder's maintenance guy the other day and he suggested to wash it with high pressure washer. Have a quick look at Bunnings and saw a few of them within $100-$200 range. Struggled a bit about whether should we buy one as we probably just going to use it once or twice every few years??

Luckily we have a neighbour who kindly borrowed us his little old "Karcher 300" as below:

It's quite noisy, and it took a while to connect the host, the long extension cable and move things out of the way. The machine is at least a few years old (can't find it in Karcher Australia web site any more!) and it leaks a bit, but it does the job pretty well!

We tried it on a capping on the side wall first, just in case anything out of control happened... At first we didn't know how to control the nozzle, and the first few trial looks like kids drawing, but the dirts were removed instantly.

We finally worked out how to adjust the nozzle head and after that was quite fun! Especially when all the dirts were removed, it's big relief and achievement to us!

After about an hour of hard work, we got all the stairs and capping cleaned, the final result as below, looks like brand new isn't it??!!

Few days later (before returning the machine actually :-) ...) we noticed we missed the 2 big sand stone cappings at the front... It's probably only a 5 minutes jobs, but it certainly took a lot longer just to setup and connect everything...

Die! You ^%^$%^&#@~@! dirt! Die Die! Ha ha ha.... Yes I was quite exciting....

After the wash, we have 2 beautiful cappings on the front fence...


Also noticed some of the paving gaps were filled with moss after a few weeks of heavy rain, specially near the water tank area.

Just look at all the dirty stuffs removed by the machine!

A slight issue with the paving cleaning is, the strong water also washed off quite a lot of the sand between the paving bricks. Have to get some more sand to fill it up later...

Any way, the whole cleaning experience was quite interesting and we probably would go ahead and buy a high pressure washer!