Power Washing in Ferndale, Michigan

A 1920s City in Active Revival

Ferndale's housing is a century old and getting younger by the year. The 1920s bungalow grid — brick fronts, original wood and asbestos-shingle siding, deep porches — is being revived house by house, and the exterior work follows the renovation calendar: washes that prep original siding for paint, gentle cleans on fresh paint that needs maintenance without damage, post-project cleanups after roofing and window work, and first-in-decades cleanings on the homes just changing hands. Half this city's washing is renovation-stage washing, and knowing which stage a house is in decides everything about how it gets cleaned.

The alleys are the workflow nobody else plans for. Ferndale's core blocks load their garages from alleys — a 1920s pattern that means the property has two fronts: the street face everyone maintains and the alley face nobody has looked at since the Nixon administration. Alley-side garages, aprons, and fence lines wear the city's oldest grime, and cleaning them means staging equipment in the alley, working around neighbors' bins and traffic, and treating the back of the property like it counts. It does — it's the face you see every time you park.

The canopy does its standard work: hundred-year street trees over 1920s blocks keep bungalow roofs streaked, gutters loaded on the two-wave calendar, and shade sides green. The housing's scale makes it all visible — on a compact bungalow, a streaked roof plane or a green shoulder is a third of what the street sees.

And the city's walkability changes the economics of clean: the 9 Mile Rd and Woodward Ave downtown — Rust Belt Market, the restaurant blocks, the storefront strips — moves the whole region through Ferndale on foot, and residential blocks walk their own streets constantly. A finished exterior here gets seen by more people in a week than a gated suburb's does in a year. Every August, Dream Cruise traffic rolls the Woodward border and turns the west side into a grandstand.

We run Ferndale from Clinton Township — under half an hour, zero travel fees, published pricing, line-item quotes within 24 hours, and crews who know which side of the house the alley is on.

Bungalow Fabric, Renovation Layers

The material archive runs deep: original wood siding under careful paint jobs and careless ones, asbestos-shingle siding that demands gentle handling and honest knowledge, brick bungalow fronts on masonry rules, and the vinyl re-sides of past decades hiding the originals beneath. Each layer washes on its own terms — wood-safe chemistry and pressure discipline on the originals, low-pressure rules on the re-sides, and pre-paint honesty everywhere: we'll tell you when a wash is maintenance and when it's prep for the painter you're about to need.

The 1940s infill adds simpler frames and the occasional ranch; the renovation wave adds new siding, roofing, and windows that deserve maintenance matched to their warranties. Hardscape runs century-old in places — original walks, alley aprons, porch steps — and cleans on old-concrete gentleness.

Geary Park and Martin Road Park anchor the family blocks, Ferndale Public Schools keeps its own identity, and the Hilton Rd corridor carries the city's workshop side. The common thread is pride at walking speed: this city sees itself daily, and the exteriors matter accordingly.