Exterior Cleaning in Anacortes, WA

What kind of housing does Anacortes have?

Mostly detached houses, and mostly lived in by their owners. The American Community Survey for 2020 to 2024 counts 8,801 housing units in the city, and 6,768 of them, about 77%, are single-family detached. Roughly 70% of occupied homes are owner-occupied, so most people booking exterior work here are looking after a house they expect to stay in for a while.

The median year built is 1989, which makes the middle of the Anacortes stock a house of the late eighties. The range either side of that is wide, though. About 1,155 units, around 13% of the total, went up in 1939 or earlier. The town incorporated in 1891, taking its name from a stylised form of Anne Curtis, the maiden name of town promoter Amos Bowman’s wife, and the city keeps its own Register of Historic Places. That register includes the Wilson Hotel at 804 Commercial Avenue, the Wasserman-Lowman House at 1502 8th Street, the Judd House at 1719 9th Street and the Great Northern Depot.

A spread like that changes how a crew should arrive. An old house with painted wood trim and original glass wants a softer approach than a nineties build clad in vinyl, and the quote ought to say which of the two we are pricing.

What does living surrounded by water do to a house?

It exposes more of the house to open weather. The City describes Anacortes as bounded by water on three sides, with Burrows Bay to the west, Guemes Channel to the north and Fidalgo Bay to the east, and it counts more than 27 miles of shoreline. A home anywhere near one of those edges usually has at least one elevation looking straight out over water.

We want to be careful about how far that argument goes. We have not found a measured salt-spray or wind figure for Anacortes, and we are not going to invent one. From general experience of shoreline property, the elevation facing open water tends to carry a film on glass and siding that dries on rather than rinsing off, and it is often the side that needs attention first. So we check which way the house faces before pricing it, rather than assuming every Anacortes address behaves like a waterfront one.

Is Anacortes really drier than the rest of Skagit County?

Over the long record, yes, by a clear margin. The Western Regional Climate Center’s Anacortes station averaged 26.70 inches of precipitation a year over a record running from 1892 to 2013. A station west-northwest of Mount Vernon averaged 32.58 inches over its own record. At the Anacortes station, November (3.84 inches) and December (3.80 inches) were the wettest months.

Two cautions come with those numbers. The Anacortes series stops in 2013, so it is a long-run average and not a current reading. And a lower total is not the same thing as dry: a shaded north slope under trees still stays damp right through the winter, and that is exactly where moss and algae settle in. We plan each job around the forecast for that week, not around a century-long mean.

How does the forest inside the city affect roofs and gutters?

It puts a great many trees close to a great many houses. The Anacortes Community Forest Lands cover more than 2,950 acres inside the city and carry over 50 miles of trail. Homes that back onto wooded ground collect leaf and needle litter in their gutters, and their roofs sit in shade for much of the day, and shade is what lets moss survive a dry summer.

The result is that two houses of the same age on the same island can need quite different schedules. A house on open ground near the water may go a long time between gutter visits, while one under a canopy may want clearing every autumn. We set the interval by what is growing overhead rather than by a fixed calendar.

Why does the town’s tap water matter to a cleaning crew?

Because it is soft, which changes what a rinse leaves behind. Anacortes draws its drinking water from the Skagit River, treats it at a city-owned plant on the east bank near Mount Vernon, and sends it 14 miles by transmission line to the Blue Heron Reservoir. The 2025 Water Quality Report puts hardness in the 0 to 60 mg/L range, typically around 30 mg/L, and classes it as soft. The city has run that system since buying it from the Washington Power, Light and Water Company on April 23, 1919.

Soft water leaves little mineral when it dries. That does not make every rinse spotless, since dirt and cleaning residue carried in the water can still dry onto a surface, but it takes away one of the main causes of the hard spotting seen in well-water towns. We still carry our own purified water for glass.

The same regional system also serves Oak Harbor and NAS Whidbey Island, La Conner, the Swinomish Tribal Community, Skagit PUD and the two March Point refineries, from a plant with a capacity of 43 million gallons a day and an estimated 56,000 customers. None of that changes how we clean a house. It is simply a useful thing to know about what comes out of an Anacortes outside tap, and why a crew that fills from one here gets a gentler result than it would in a town that pumps hard groundwater.

What we do on Fidalgo Island

Four services have their own Anacortes pages, and most houses here book two or more of them in a single visit:

• Window glass, inside and out, with screens, tracks and sills, and a water-fed pole for the upper storeys. The detail is on the Anacortes window page.
• Gutters, cleared by hand with every downspout checked for flow, set out on the Anacortes gutter page.
• Roofs, soft washed at low pressure with moss lifted by hand, never blasted with a pressure washer. See the Anacortes roof page.
• Siding, washed at low pressure with a cleaning solution, given time to work, then rinsed, as explained on the Anacortes house washing page.

Order matters when several are booked together. Roof first, gutters second, then walls, then glass last, so nothing from above lands on a surface that has just been cleaned.

Where does the wash water go in Anacortes?

Straight to salt water, if it reaches a storm drain. The city’s drainage flows to five water bodies: Guemes Channel, Burrows Bay, Fidalgo Bay, Padilla Bay and Similk Bay. Its environment background document counts 31 storm-drain outfalls to Fidalgo Bay, 19 to Guemes Channel and 13 to Burrows Bay.

Anacortes Municipal Code 18.30.050 says nobody may discharge anything other than stormwater into the stormwater system. Its list of illicit discharges names soap, detergent, household and commercial cleaning materials and steam-cleaning waste. The same section conditionally allows routine external building wash-down that uses no detergent. The chapter was amended in 2022 by Ordinance 4023, which set up a Source Control Program under the city’s Phase II municipal stormwater permit.

In practice, a plain-water rinse can sit inside the code, while anything carrying a cleaning agent has to be kept away from inlets. That means drains covered or bermed, runoff steered onto planting and soil, and recovery where a job calls for it. Our fuller approach is set out on wash water and storm drains.

What about the refineries on March Point?

They are part of the view from much of town. Shell built a refinery on March Point in 1953 and Texaco followed in 1957, and customers sometimes ask whether that affects what builds up on their houses. We have no measurement linking anything we clean off Anacortes homes to the refineries, so we do not claim a link. If a residue turns up that we cannot account for, you will hear what we saw and what removed it, and not a guess at where it came from.

Which parts of Anacortes and nearby do we cover?

All of the city. The areas the City itself names in its planning documents, such as Skyline, Ship Harbor, the Cap Sante Marina waterfront and March Point, are all inside the area we work. Anacortes is run on the Skagit side of the route together with Burlington and Mount Vernon, and we also cover La Conner and Oak Harbor, which do not have pages of their own.

If your address is somewhere else on Fidalgo Island, ring and ask. You will get a straight answer about whether we can reach you on a regular basis, and if we cannot, we would rather tell you than book a job we will struggle to return to.

Arranging a visit

Phone (360) 303-6806 or send a note through the contact page. Someone comes to the house, walks round the outside with you, and puts a price on what is actually there, whether that is one gutter run or the whole exterior. King of Kings Window Cleaning LLC carries a Washington State business licence and Labor & Industries coverage, and anyone who turns up to work on your house has been trained by the owner first.