shPressure Washing in Ridley Park, PA
Power washing and soft washing for Ridley Park’s Victorian and early-1900s homes on curving streets around the lake.
Ridley Park was laid out as a planned Victorian resort town around a lake, and it still reads that way - curving streets, wide porches, ornamental woodwork. It is also a low-lying borough built around water, and standing water nearby changes what grows on a house.
Water nearby means more than damp
Being near the lake and the creek can keep humidity up, and consistently humid air supports mildew on the shaded side of a house far more than a dry inland street does. The black speckling on a north wall here is usually mildew rather than algae, and the two respond to different strengths of the same approach.
Ornamental woodwork is a hand job
Victorian brackets, bargeboards and porch detail have a hundred edges, and every one of them holds dirt. Blasting them from the ground cleans the flat faces and leaves the detail, as well as risking the paint. The only way to finish trim like this properly is by hand, and it is worth asking any company you call whether they intend to.
Planned streets and mature trees
A town laid out as a landscaped park in the 1870s now has mature trees along many of its streets. That shade is part of the charm, and it keeps walls, porches and walks damp. Shaded Victorian siding and porch floors are where that damp shows first.
Porch floors and front steps
Ridley Park's Victorians were built for porch life, and many still have wide porches with painted wood or concrete floors. Painted porch floors get a soft wash. Concrete porch floors get a surface cleaner and hand-detailed edges, like the Drexel Hill porch in our portfolio.
A schedule that suits a shaded borough
Under Ridley Park's mature trees, a yearly house wash in late spring keeps mildew from settling in, and a fall cleaning of walks and porches after the leaves come down stops tannin stains before winter. Two lighter visits a year are easier on painted Victorian trim than one big catch-up after several years of growth.
The nearest completed job to Ridley Park
The closest work we have photographed is about five miles away in Drexel Hill: An older stone home, siding to sidewalk. Same housing-stock questions, same methods, and you can look at every frame of it before you call.
See That JobRidley Park, in brief.
Ridley Park was founded in 1871 by Isaac Hinckley, president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, as a new suburban stop on his line. He hired the Boston landscape architect Robert Morris Copeland to plan it, and the result was Delaware County's first planned community, with landscaped streets, parks and a 20-acre lake made by damming the creek.
Wealthy Philadelphians made it a summer resort in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and they built most of the Victorian homes still lived in today. The first passenger train stopped there on October 19, 1872. Many streets carry the names of the families who sold their farms for the development: Burk, Dutton, Free, Henderson, Stewart and Ward.
John Morton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, grew up in a log cabin by East Ridley Avenue. Today the borough is home to Boeing's vertical lift division, where the CH-47 Chinook helicopter is built.
Ridley Park sits along Chester Pike, one of the region's oldest roads, which grew from a Lenape footpath into the Queen's Highway. The railroad that founded the borough still runs through it, and Swarthmore, Springfield and Aston are all a short drive away. Ridley Park is small, a little over a square mile, and most of it was planned at once, so many streets share the same mix of Victorian homes, porches and mature trees. The needs of one house are often a good guide to the next, starting with the shaded side.
What we clean in Ridley Park.
Every service below is available in Ridley Park, and most homes book two or three of them together, which costs less than separate visits.
Answered for this town specifically.
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Is the lake making my house dirtier?
How close is your nearest job to Ridley Park?
Can you clean painted porch floors and steps?
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