Power Washing in Armada, Michigan

A Village Grid, and the Farm Country It Sits In

Elijah Burke settled here in 1833 and called the corner Burke's Corners; the place became Honeoye, then Armada, and incorporated as a village in the late 1860s. The frame houses on the grid around Main St and Fulton St went up between the 1870s and the 1910s, in the decades when the Armada Elevator and then the 1890 train depot tied the township's farms to market. Painted wood siding and cut trim still cover most of them. The brick Main St storefronts came later, rebuilt after a fire leveled the wooden business district in the late 1800s.

Brick turns up again on the Armada Free Public Library, a Carnegie building begun in 1915, and on Old Armada High School, the 1929 brick block on Burk St that now holds the Armada Area Schools offices and the Dick Enberg Museum. Later in the century vinyl and aluminum filled out the rest of the village lots. Past the village line the materials change once more: metal siding and wood on pole barns, equipment sheds and outbuildings, with farmhouses set well back on long gravel-flanked drives through orchard and farm country.

The East Branch of Coon Creek runs through the center of the village, and the lots along it stay damp and shaded well into the morning. That is where green film shows first on painted north walls and where black streaking starts on the roofs above them. Out on the township parcels the problem is mineral rather than biological: private wells leave rust-orange iron under spigots, hose bibs and sprinkler heads, and the gravel roads throw a fine dust that settles on siding, barn walls and flatwork. Along Main St and Armada Ridge Rd, winter salt and fair-week traffic add their own gray film.

Six services below get their own Armada page, each written for these walls and these stains. The drive is about 35 minutes from our Clinton Township shop, on a northeast route that also covers Romeo, Richmond and Ray Township, so the distance costs you nothing and the schedule does not push rural work to one day a month. Macomb Power Washing Solutions has run since June 2022, carries $2M general liability plus workers' compensation, and sends a line-item quote back within 24 hours.

Painted Wood, Village Brick, and Farm Metal

The village-era frame houses set the method. Painted wood siding, cut trim and porch detail hold paint in every condition from fresh to tired, so the wash reads the paint first and the mix stays mild. Under the canopy around Main St and Fulton St, and heaviest on the creek-side lots, north walls grow algae every year and porch ceilings hold mildew longer than the walls do. Hand work on the trim is part of every one of those jobs.

Masonry is the second category. The brick along Main St, the library and the 1929 school block on Burk St carry mortar that has been outdoors for a century or more, so brick gets a mild solution and rinse-level pressure that leaves the joints alone. The vinyl and aluminum houses from later in the century are the easiest walls in the village, though fifty-year-old aluminum chalks, and the powder has to be pre-treated so it comes off in one even layer rather than in blotches.

The township properties are the third, and they are the reason our trucks carry their own water. A farmhouse, a pole barn, two equipment sheds and a concrete apron are one job, not four, and the crew works them in a single mobilization. Metal barn siding takes a different mix than painted wood, dust film along the gravel roads wants a surfactant rather than force, and every spigot fed by a private well has an iron stain under it that a normal wash will not touch. Those get treated separately.