Log Home Annual Maintenance Program
As you know, log and wood sided homes require regular maintenance to look their best and for the stain to perform like it’s supposed to. In addition to cleaning the surface of your home, most log homes also require several other annual maintenance items, such as treating for carpenter bee’s in the spring, cleaning the exterior windows and screens, cleaning out gutters, etc.
For years, our customers have been asking us to present to them a predictable form of maintenance for their log and wood sided homes. After some extensive testing with a few of our clients, we are happy to offer the Bear Creek Annual Maintenance Program. Please look over the specifications we offer and contact us as soon as possible to schedule your maintenance and get rid of your headaches!
You will be happy to note that we offer a special proposal to our clients that are just starting with us to have their carpenter bee treatment done. After we do your bee treatment, we will be happy to measure your home free of charge and give you a price to perform our annual maintenance at a later time. Of course, if we wash your home, we will then be washing off the treatment we just applied! As an incentive to you, we will re-apply the carpenter bee spray treatment and dust any new holes at no charge if you have the work done within three months of this treatment.
Finally, take note of the fact that we offer a 5 year price lock for you to get all this done annually, if you commit to having it done for 5 years running. Of course, we don’t ask that you pay for any work up front, and if you sell the home, etc, you are not obligated to any other payments. Rather, this is just an incentive from us to you to help you simplify the maintenance on your home, and keep a working relationship with our best customers.
Thank you for your interest in having us take care of your cabin maintenance, and we look forward to serving you for years to come.
Sincerely,
Rich Littlefield
Annual Maintenance Scope of Work
- When we first arrive, we will identify plants and other areas such as water features that require extra care. With plants, we will saturate the plants and the ground nearby with water, which will keep the cleaning solutions we apply diluted to help prevent plant damage. Water features that are close to the house will be covered with plastic to avoid getting anything in the water.
- First, if you don’t have gutter guards that keep water out of the gutter, we start with the gutter cleaning, so that later we can rinse any debris that may end up on the house during the gutter cleaning. We rinse the gutters out with water if there is a lot of “sludge”, and make sure the downspouts are draining properly. If they are not, we can “snake” them down to the ground to make sure they are working. If the blockage is in a drainage system underground, we recommend calling a plumber out to finish clearing the blockage.
- Using a stain and environmentally friendly cleaning solution, we saturate all the exterior walls, decks, railings, lattice, etc. and low pressure wash to remove mold, mildew, dust, dirt and pollen. Removing these food sources for mold and mildew will greatly increase the length of time before they can grow on the surface. Vertical stains are particularly sensitive to high pressure washing, and many times, it’s possible to remove stain that doesn’t need to come off, due to the flexible nature of most log home stains.
- Decks and railings really take a beating from the weather. It’s very common for stain to need reapplication every year or so for the first few years, to allow protection to “build up” inside the wood. We use higher pressure on decks and railings, because they always seem to need it.
- Using the low pressure washing system, we wash the screens and windows. We will replace screens if the weather is warm or store them for you if we are heading into winter. If it’s been a while since you had the windows cleaned, we will scrub them with a truck washing brush while the house is being soaked, and then rinse them. The extra scrub, combined with our special rinsing agents in our cleaning solution, usually leaves them sparkling clean.
- Carpenter bees are the bane of all log home owners. Left unchecked, they will propagate and get worse every year, drilling more and more holes. We have a great system to drastically decrease the numbers of holes that get drilled, and hatch out new bees.
- First, we locate all the open holes on the house and puff with powdered desiccant insecticide. We use a tool that uses air pressure to blow the dust deep into the gallery, where is stays dry and active indefinitely. Any bees that show up during the spring will often check out the existing holes and make use of them if they are empty. Many of these new bees will then make contact with the dust and leave the hole as it dehydrates them. This leaves the hole open and ready for the next bee that comes along. For this reason, we don’t caulk up all the holes we treat, since it prevents the bees from contacting the dust we’ve put in.
- Next step on the carpenter bee treatment is to spray contact insecticide on all the eaves of the house and the gables where there is a lot of bee activity. This is a temporary wettable powder that is effective for around 8 months on a protected area, such as the eaves of your house. This will affect all bees that walk on it long enough to pick up a sufficient amount of pesticide to kill them. It’s very safe, since its not applied in an area where anything else will contact it during its use.
- Doing these two steps every spring will really make a huge difference in the number of bees that actually drill into your home! You may still see them, but rest assured, they won’t be around for long! If you don’t want to even see them, maybe you could buy several of the “bait traps” for bees and give them to your neighbors to draw the bees their way!
To take advantage of the 5 year Price Guarantee associated with this program, simply enroll in the East Ellijay maintenance program. We will provide the maintenance services on the anniversary month of your initial service, or work with you to find a better time within a few months of that date. By your commitment to having the service done regularly; we can lock in the maintenance price for 5 years.
