Don’t Let Stains Make Your Building Look Run Down

There are many different stains that can happen around buildings.

And the only thing they have in common is how bad they make the place look.

Cleanliness is a subjective concept and everyone has different thresholds for what they find acceptable. Regardless of where that line is, most people can become angry and frustrated by stains on something they consider valuable.  Here’s a brief story about someone particularly unlucky with stains:

 

Stan’s Tragic Stains

Stan had become moderately successful by purchasing and managing several small commercial properties.  One property had to have a lot of work done to get tenants in.  Stan invested a lot of thought, time and money into the building and landscaping to make it appealing. And he was proud of the end result – both the appearance of the property and the money stream generated by high-end tenants.

Four weeks later, Stan stared despondently at his once-proud property, wondering why the gods had decided to pick on him.

It was such an attractive place, he thinks, people liked working here just so they could have lunch in the courtyard!

It’s late evening in early fall and Stan was just dropped off by a taxi. Stan meant to give the driver his home address, but it had been a long night fueled by anger, frustration, depression and a few too many glasses of Merlot.  Stan didn’t realize till he was there that he’d been driven in entirely the wrong direction from his home.  But since he was at the accursed property and the cabbie was already gone, he fuzzily started to wallow in the problems of the past few months.

It started with the fertilizer and that cheap lawn care service.  They fertilized the lawns, but they didn’t clean up all the fertilizer pellets that had scattered across the drive-lanes.  The next night was when the big storm hit the city and the day after the storm thousands of rust colored stains appeared on every concrete surface anywhere near any grass.  All that nice new curb and gutter, most of the driveway entrance and the central entrance to the building was splattered with ugly reddish-brown stains – the evidence of ironite from the fertilizer scattered on the grass and concrete.  Once it got wet it soaked into the grass, where it belonged, but it also soaked into the concrete where it became a bunch of nasty stains.

And, Oh! That storm!  Stan hadn’t been in town when it hit, but it was massive – as was the damage it caused for many people throughout the city.  Most of that damage was taken care of by insurance – like the new roof.

But other things happened to Stan’s property during and after the repairs that the insurance didn’t have anything to do with.  Like all the leaves on the concrete where the roofers laid a tarp down for several days while they did their work.  Who would have thought that a few days of wet leaves trapped under a tarp would leave permanent leaf-shaped stains in the concrete?

At least the leaf stains had been a total accident.  Stan wasn’t so sure the roofers hadn’t known about the bad oil leak on their truck when they parked it in the drive lane next to the main entrance.  Their truck sat there making oil stains for most of three days!  The big black stains made Stan feel like throwing up!

The storm had ravaged all his new trees too, tearing several of them right out of the ground and stripping most of the flowers in the big flowerbeds by the entrance.  Stan had to wait for city street crews to finish resurfacing the asphalt before he could start his landscaping repairs.

But that had turned into more ugly stains when the landscaper’s skid-steers had tracked the fresh tar in the asphalt onto his concrete entrance area.  The landscaper had tried to power wash the tire marks but didn’t accomplish much. The landscaper was very sorry when the marks didn’t wash away. The landscaper blamed the city – what could he do?

Stan swayed with the magnitude of his frustration as he remembered the next thing that had gone wrong. It was the final blotch, the worst disfigurement of his poor property, and the only one he actually watched happen.

Stan was standing in the same spot now as he had been that fateful day (was it only yesterday?).  If bad luck came in deals, this was a buy-one get-one-free and no one cared whether the freebie was worth more or less than the paid one.  Stan’s intoxicated mind was vivid with the horrifying images (definitely only yesterday!).

The dump truck drove up the brown-spotted concrete and backed up to a spot of lawn that was in need of repair anyway.  The dump bed lifted up, up, up, then there was a pop, then men were yelling and cursing.  Stan looked around the back of the truck but didn’t see anything.  Then he saw the truck driver get out of the cab and look down, so Stan looked down.

It was gushing.  Someone later called it a leak, but Stan remembered it more as a torrent; a flood; a shimmering, cascading waterfall of translucent hydraulic fluid.  Stan stood still and watched as the driver and landscaper worked to contain the stains, but he knew his already battered concrete was receiving a fatal wound – a scar that would never heal.  At that point Stan was too overwhelmed by the mounting stains on his property to move.

But that couldn’t be the end of it!  No! Of course not! What good is an accursed property if that’s all it can throw at a man when he’s down!

The dump truck pulled away from the partially unloaded load of top soil, driving around the loop that took it past the blond brick building.  Stan was standing by the main entrance, wind in his face, watching the big truck go by, subconsciously noting the tracks of hydraulic fluid stains its tires were leaving as it rolled past, when it happened.  Stan didn’t know the mechanics of it, but he knew the truck suffered a catastrophic failure when there was an ear-splitting boom and a massive cloud of black smoke billowed out of the stack.  

 Stan had stumbled backward in shock, startled by the loud boom, and fell on his back.  As he turned his head up to follow the cloud of diesel soot, he felt moisture on his face.  He wiped the moisture away with his fingers and looked at the dark liquid.  He sniffed at it.  Oil.  Dirty.  Diesel.  Oil.  Stan remembered the fear and apprehension as he peered through the slowly dissipating smoke at the front of his building.  The wind had carried the mist of oil from the truck’s smokestack to splatter almost the entire front of his building.  His blond brick building.

Stan’s memories were too much for him.  He shouted out his frustration at the top of his lungs.  He swung his arms at imagined enemies.  He cursed the lawn-care guy and the storm, the landscaper and the dump truck manufacturer; he cursed oil and asphalt, leaves and fertilizer.

Stan’s cursing and shouting was so loud it disturbed a flock of pigeons.  The pigeons took to the air.  They circled around and flew right over Stan, who was at that moment in the midst of an alcohol-fueled, wolf-like howl.  One of the pigeons had perfect aim.

Several minutes later Stan stared at the purplish stains spreading out in front of him.  As though time had been slowed, he could almost see the former contents of his stomach seeping into the pores of the concrete, carrying the diluted color of the evening’s earlier libations deep into the concrete, in the middle of the main entrance of his devastated building, on his horribly afflicted property.

With the clarity that sometimes comes after purging the body of toxins, Stan decided it was time to take action!  The cause of all the blemishes to his property no longer mattered as much as fixing those blemishes.  In the aftermath of his violent reminiscing, cool logic took over and Stan chose to find an expert on stains to help him restore his troubled property to its original splendor.

To remove the stains on your building, call an experienced pressure washing company.

 

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