It rained quite heavily today, which was a great opportunity for me to institute the plan I had for cleaning my balcony. The heavily rainfall was ideal for masking the copious amounts of water that I planned on using on the deck.
Grabbing a bucket and a mop, I filled the bucket with warm soapy water while a torrential rain filled the sky. It was well over a year since I washed the deck but it deceptively didn’t seem that dirty. I was very, very wrong. As soon as the first bit of water hit the deck with my mop, I realized there was a large amount of dirt on my balcony. The water ran almost instantly black. It took a lot of soapy water and elbow grease with the mop to clean even just a small patch of the deck. I wound up having to refill the bucket with more water and soap many times before getting through the entire length of the balcony. At several spots, I had to repeatedly add more water and mop again and again because dirt would seem to come out of nowhere in those areas.
In the end, my balcony didn’t even get to a sparkling clean state. There was still some noticeable amounts of dirt in several areas. Unfortunately, the rain stopped falling which couldn’t mask the water cascading from my deck. I was afraid that someone down below me would start noticing the water. Worse yet, I didn’t even get to clean the problem areas by the railing. In those areas, moss and mildew had taken hold. The mop and soapy water wasn’t going to get rid of that anytime soon. I’m going to have to get a real deck cleaning solution for those areas.
This is going to be a work in progress for now but hopefully everything will cleaned up in time for the real summer weather.