A house that looks like it was remodeled is enough to send John Chester out for a look before he puts a number on the job. So is a long list of things that might complicate the work.
Chester runs Ladder & Bucket with his brother Matt. The company soft washes houses and roofs, pressure washes concrete and brick, cleans gutters and windows, mostly for homeowners in and between Greensboro and Burlington. Some jobs are simple enough that John can quote them without a visit, and he does. When something seems off, he would rather go.
“I prefer to take a look, see what we’re getting ourselves into,” he says. He likes walking the property, “meeting the client, feeling them out, seeing what their needs are.”
What he is protecting is the quote itself. “If I give someone a quote, I prefer to stick to it if at all possible and just be transparent up front,” he says. The visit is meant to catch, before he names a price, whatever would otherwise force him to raise it once the work begins.
Chester traces that habit to his grandfather, who ran a janitorial service and “was big on hard work and just doing the right thing.” What Chester took from it is to show up and “treat each house as if it were our own.”
The walkaround is also where the prep starts. Chester thinks it is a big part of why homeowners hire them: “we take the time to prep each property and then have honest discussions with each homeowner before the job starts.” The company describes every house wash as beginning with a walk around the house and steps to protect the property. A low-pressure solution goes on, sits a few minutes and is rinsed off from top to bottom. Roofs get the same soft wash, which the brothers say follows the major shingle manufacturers’ recommendations. Gutter jobs begin with blowing off the roof, then clearing the gutters, checking the downspouts for clogs and reattaching any sagging lines and elbows.
The brothers do all of it. “We quote the work, we do the work,” Chester says. There are no employees. One of them is on every job, and usually both, unless a day calls for splitting up to cover two.
The business grew out of Chester’s years in roofing sales. He was looking for a change, he says, and kept hearing the same request. It started from “a lot of my roofing clients asking if I knew anybody that did gutter cleaning or pressure washing.” He saw a need and went after it with Matt.
Most of the work is still residential. Commercial jobs, which the company lists as including apartments, banks, office parks and assisted living facilities, make up a smaller share.
The name was picked with growth in mind. “The idea with the name was to keep it kind of open ended so we could add services as we go along,” he says. He talks about someday running a one-stop property management company, getting a general contractor’s license and moving into investment properties. Fence installation is on the list for when they bring on help. For now he is in no hurry. He has worked for companies that blew up overnight and went out of business within three or four years. “Just trying to do it slow and steady,” he says.
The service area follows the brothers’ own map. John lives in Greensboro and Matt in Burlington, about 30 minutes apart. John’s end reaches High Point, Jamestown and Oak Ridge. Matt’s reaches Graham and Mebane, which Chester calls about the furthest they like to go, though a large enough job can pull them farther. Otherwise, he says, “we typically like to keep it within a 20 to 30 minute drive of each of our houses,” and the stretch between the two is wide enough that “we hit all the towns in between.”