Tackled my first job this weekend that the wife got me through a business friend.
Neither of us had seen it and she wanted doing ASAP, so just turned up on spec as it was some distance from home, and what a shocker.
A great two floor mansion with 25 windows most of these each had 20 panels (7" x 9" approx) grubby as hell and even worse on the inside of them.
My initial problems.
1) Getting the ladder up to the high windows ( 3 section 3.5m at about 80% of it's range) just about managed it with a stand off with wheels, but how do you manipulate the ladder from window to window? Joggle it across bit by bit or drop the ladder and re-erect? With the standoff on it becomes quite heavy and unwieldly even down at 3.5m, but I guess this comes with experience?
2) Being able to tell what marks are on the inside and what are on the outside after cleaning them ( I was only doing the outsides)? I ended up doing most of them twice and afterwards it was difficult to tell that they had been cleaned. Which is very dissapointing for both me and the customer.
3) Because the panels were so small I was on my 6" squeegie but was picking white paint up from the grubby wooden framework and then this was marking the windows thus I had to clean them again.
4) Using a 6" squeegee doing two passes in such a small panel what is the knack for not leaving a streak as there is less room to manoeuvre compared to doing large windows with a large squeegee
, bearing in mind that there were 20 panels per window.
All comments greatly appreciated.
5) Pricing, initially I adopted about £3 per window knowing that I was going to be slow being a newbie so put this down to experience and the uphill learning curve. Does this sound about fair?