How To Remove Graffiti 101 If a House is Struck Before a Showing, & Don’t Clean Up After Rolling With Fire

As we reported late yesterday, Oak Lawn’s Legacy of Love Monument, Cathedral of Hope, plus other buildings were vandalized by nasty graffiti early Sunday morning including the building that houses The Dallas Observer, the building that houses D Magazine (no!)  and even the Dallas Morning News. Yesterday a few power cleaning companies volunteered to clean off the spray paint. Which got me thinking about times that homes have been rolled with toilet paper, or worse, by kids. What do you do when that happens right before a showing?

The toilet paper is always a mess, especially if it rains, but usually it’s just a sign that the owner’s kids are popular.

A far worse form of harassment I have heard of was when one intrepid child years ago “forked” a lawn with forks jammed into the lawn designed to clog the lawn mower. I find this egregious because the forks not only can ruin an expensive lawn mower, which usually belongs to the lawn service, they can cause serious injury. This youngster used plastic forks, less dangerous.

But I have heard about kids using spray paint on lawns, and sometimes sidewalks, to harass other teens. So how do you remove paint graffiti? The grass gets mowed, hopefully, no forks in the yard.

What you do NOT do, according to Brandon Meeks of OSME Power Washing Services, is scrub the graffiti with scrub brushes. No! Not only does it ruin a good manicure, it forces the paint further into the pores of the concrete, making it very difficult to impossible to remove.  Cold water pressure washer could also further damage the monument.

The pros use a biodegradable, proprietary product which they spray on, let sit, and then rinse with high pressure, HOT water (180 degrees) which removes 95-100% of the paint.

You could do this at home by carrying buckets of hot water out, I guess, or boiling water from the stove. Has anyone ever had to clean up graffiti before an open house or showing? Rolling? How did you do it? What’s your worst nightmare story…

I have one. A homeowner in Alabama thought she could get that toilet paper out of a magnolia tree REAL FAST by BURNING it out of the tree. Seriously. She ended up burning down her entire home.

Crausewell told WBRC she was just trying to get rid of a tiny bit stuck to a magnolia tree when the fire quickly escalated.

‘It just popped out into a little patch and we tried to put it out and it just kept going, so I was trying to keep it from going down the front porch and came down the bank and around the back of the house,’ she said.