When it comes to Selling your home curb appeal is a big factor once people first see your house. One quick fix to brighten up the exterior of your home is to clean and seal your concrete. Cleaning and sealing your concrete walkway, porch and patio is fairly cheap if done by yourself.
To start off, Remove any furniture you may have into the yard, No need to worry about any landscaping the Pressure Washing wont harm any plants or trees. It is a good tip to use a old mud flap or welcome mat around mulch or anywhere it may puddle and fling mud anywhere to protect yourself wile you are cleaning the sides of a porch or that inch or so along the sides of a walkway.
Now you are ready to begin cleaning. Start off by cleaning the whole pad, walkway or porch. It is not necessary to use any stain removers or concrete brighteners in this step. Clean starting from the top of your driveway ether if its higher at the street or higher at the house, you don’t want to be covering everything you just cleaned with more dirt do you ? Then when that is out of the way you can now go over any oil stains with a product and concrete brightener tho I don’t recommend it, I think it just turns your concrete white and it’s to easy to mess up your driveway. Once you have this out of the way move on to cleaning the other sections of your walkway or patio then let it dry for the day and come back tomorrow to start to seal, Even tho it may look dry there may be some moisture inside the concrete that will turn your nice new sealed driveway white where there was moisture.
Now its time to seal your driveway or patio, start off by reading the directions for the sealer. I recommend you use a paint tray and a paint roller just like you would use for your house. If your out to buy these you may want to buy a set of bigger ones made for sealing driveways. avoid pump spraying sealer onto the driveway it will 90% turn out like crap.
When you start to seal make sure you only pay attention to puting the sealer on in a even consistent manner, Some sealers penetrate the concrete and it starts to look like its all uneven but trust me, its not! It will just take a hour for it to all even out and by not keeping track of consistency you will run the risk of applying to much in the spots you thought looked like there was to little and the whole project may turn out to look like a zebra.
If you are uncomfortable taking on this project by yourself I recommend getting a few quotes and bid’s from local pressure washer’s. Check the yellow pages as well as the Internet and ask for pictures of similar jobs they have done. There are allot of fly by nighters out there and your house may be the 1st time they have ever done a driveway sealing job before.
