- Client
- John Siemering Custom Homes
- Project
- Custom home handover
- Scope
- Back patios, driveways and garage floors
- Track record
- Third project for this builder
The short version
John Siemering Custom Homes brought us in to clean a finished house before handover, the third project we have done for them. The scope was the back patios, the driveways and the garage floors. The garage floors were the hard part: the slab had been the paint and drywall station for months, and dried drywall mud does not come off concrete with a cleaning solution. It had to be cut off with pressure.
The project
A custom home is finished long before it looks finished. The trades work indoors on a slab that is not covered yet, and the garage carries the worst of it, because the garage is where the paint gets mixed and the drywall gets cut. By the time the cabinets are in and the doors are hung, the floor underneath is carrying every day of that.
Which is the part a builder cannot hand over. A buyer walking a new house reads the garage floor as a statement about how the house was built, fairly or not, and a slab covered in white splatter says the job is not done.
Before the clean
The garage is the last room to stop being a workshop
Paint cans, a stepladder and sheet goods along the back wall, and drywall mud dried across a slab nobody has looked at since the pour. This is the normal state of a garage in the last weeks of a build, and it is the state the cleaning crew inherits.
The same bay, before and during
Thirty-six minutes apart, same corner. The drywall splatter is gone in the second frame and the slab is still soaking wet, which is why it reads darker rather than cleaner. Wet concrete always does. The dry result is further down.
What Taking Drywall Mud Off Concrete Looks Like
Fifty seconds from the operator's point of view. The nozzle is a turbo, which spins a single pencil jet in a cone, and it is doing something no cleaning solution can do: cutting a hardened deposit off the surface it dried onto.
This is the exception to what the rest of this site argues. Organic growth comes off with chemistry and gentle pressure, and high pressure on limestone or a shingle roof causes damage. Cured drywall mud on a concrete slab is neither of those. It is a hard deposit on the one surface that takes real pressure, and force is the correct tool.
A turbo nozzle lifting dried drywall mud off a garage slab What makes a builder handover different
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The deposit decides the method
Organic growth is killed with chemistry and rinsed. Cured drywall mud is a hard deposit that has to be cut off. Reaching for the same method on both is how a crew either fails to clean the floor or damages something else trying.
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Concrete is the surface that takes pressure
Limestone, stucco and shingle are damaged by high pressure. A concrete slab is the one common exterior surface that is not, which is what makes the turbo nozzle the right answer here and the wrong answer almost everywhere else on a house.
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You are working in a finished house
Painted walls, hung doors, fitted cabinets and new trim are all within a few feet of the work. The slab is the only thing on site that can take what is being applied to it.
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The handover date does not move
A builder has a closing to hit. The cleaning sits at the end of the schedule, which means it absorbs every delay ahead of it and still has to finish on the original day.
How we approached it
- 01
Sorted the surfaces by what was on them
Patios, driveways and garage floors are all concrete, and they were not all carrying the same thing. What is on the slab decides the method, not what the slab is made of.
- 02
Cut the drywall mud off the garage slabs
A turbo nozzle on commercial-grade equipment, which is what it takes to lift a hardened deposit off concrete. The nozzle concentrates the pressure into a spinning jet rather than spreading it across a fan.
- 03
Ran the open flatwork with a surface cleaner
Driveways and patios get an even result from a surface cleaner, rather than the striping a wand leaves across a large slab.
- 04
Handed the house back
Off site and out of the builder's way, which on a handover is as much of the job as the cleaning.
The outcome
A garage floor that reads as part of a finished house
Dry, and with the splatter gone. This is a different bay from the pair above and it is the honest version of the result, because it is the one a buyer would actually walk into rather than the one shot while the water was still on the ground.
It was the third project for this builder. The first two are why there was a third.
Building something that has to be handed over clean?
We work as the exterior cleaning subcontractor on new builds and remodels across Austin and Central Texas: insured, documented, scheduled around the other trades, and off site as soon as the work is done. Commercial inquiries go to Jared directly.
Related
More commercial work
Have a build to hand over?
Tell us the site and the date it has to be clean by.
Rather talk it through? 512-883-5420