On a townhome, the first thing to establish is who actually owns the wall you are planning to clean.
I have turned up to quote inner loop and Energy Corridor townhomes where the owner was certain the front elevation was theirs, and the recorded declaration said the association maintained it. I have also seen the opposite, where an owner waited two years for an association to clean a wall the association had no duty to touch. Both situations cost the owner money, and neither had anything to do with cleaning technique.
Texas draws a hard line between two kinds of property that both get called townhomes, and the line changes who is allowed to hire me. Here is how to work out which side you are on, and what changes once you know.
Two kinds of townhome, with opposite answers
The word on the For Sale sign decides nothing. What decides it is the recorded declaration for your property, and which chapter of the Texas Property Code it falls under.
A condominium regime falls under chapter 82, the Uniform Condominium Act, which applies to condominiums whose declaration was recorded on or after January 1, 1994 (Texas Property Code chapter 82). Plenty of Houston properties that look like townhomes, with their own front doors and no shared corridor, are legally condominiums.
A fee-simple townhome in a subdivision with a property owners association falls under chapter 209, the Texas Residential Property Owners Protection Act. That chapter applies only to a residential subdivision whose declaration authorises the association to collect assessments, and it says plainly that it “does not apply to a condominium” (Texas Property Code chapter 209).
The Texas State Law Library puts the practical warning up front: most of the law governing property owners associations does not apply to condominiums, because condominium associations are legally distinct (Texas State Law Library). So advice you read about your neighbour’s HOA may be exactly wrong for you.
Find your declaration before you book anything, since it was recorded in the Harris County real property records and your closing packet almost certainly contains a copy.
In a condominium regime, the exterior often is not yours
Under chapter 82, the association is responsible for maintenance, repair and replacement of the common elements, and each unit owner is responsible for their own unit. Common elements means all portions of the condominium other than the units. The association also has express power to regulate the maintenance, repair and appearance of the condominium.
What that means in practice is that the wall you are looking at may well be the association’s responsibility, and arranging your own contractor to work on it can put you crosswise with the association and, if something goes wrong, with its insurer.
Between those two categories sits a third that causes most of the arguments. Chapter 82 treats things like shutters, awnings, doorsteps, stoops, porches, balconies, patios, and exterior doors and windows as limited common elements allocated exclusively to the unit they serve. Those are exactly the surfaces an exterior cleaner touches on a townhome, and they belong plainly to neither side.
None of this is fixed, because every one of those rules is a default that the statute qualifies with “except as provided by the declaration,” so your declaration can reassign any of it. Read yours, and if the language is ambiguous, that is a question for the association or your own attorney rather than for me.
In a fee-simple townhome, it is yours to maintain and theirs to enforce
If you are in a chapter 209 subdivision, you generally maintain your own exterior, and what the association has instead is the restrictive covenants.
Texas law says a restrictive covenant is liberally construed to give effect to its purposes and intent, and that an association’s exercise of discretionary authority is presumed reasonable unless a court finds it arbitrary, capricious or discriminatory (Texas Property Code chapter 202). So when a board writes to you about algae on the front elevation, the starting position favours the board.
There is a procedural protection on your side, though. Chapter 209 gives an owner who is entitled to an opportunity to cure the right to request a hearing before the board to discuss and verify the facts. The Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M notes that where an owner entitled to cure requests a hearing, the association must provide one (Texas Real Estate Research Center).
That protection is one of the clearest reasons to know your regime, because it does not reach condominium owners at all.
The shared wall is the part to be careful with
A party wall is a dividing wall shared between two properties owned by separate parties, and it is generally presumed to be common property owned by two tenants in common unless something proves otherwise (Cornell Legal Information Institute). In a condominium regime, chapter 82 handles it by dividing the wall: the portion serving only one unit is a limited common element, and the portion serving more than one unit is a general common element.
Strip away the vocabulary and the practical point is simple. A wall you share is not a wall you get to make unilateral decisions about. Before anyone puts water on it, talk to the neighbour whose unit is on the other side, and where an association is involved, to the association. That conversation takes ten minutes and prevents the kind of dispute that outlasts the stain.
Access runs into the same problem, and on zero lot line construction, which is how a great deal of Houston townhome stock is built, the wall sits at or very near the property line and the gap between buildings can be too narrow to stand in comfortably, let alone position equipment. Reaching your own wall often means standing on somebody else’s ground.
At a shared wall, the damage risk is water, not dirt
This is where the technical argument and the neighbourly one point the same way.
The National Park Service is blunt about what high pressure does to a wall assembly: high-pressure wet cleaning may force an inordinate amount of water into the walls, affecting interior materials such as plaster or joist ends, as well as metal building components within the walls (National Park Service, Preservation Brief 6). On a detached house that damage stays yours to deal with, while on a party wall it can surface inside your neighbour’s unit, with your contractor’s invoice sitting there as the timeline.
The pressures that are actually appropriate are far lower than most people assume. The General Services Administration’s masonry cleaning procedure specifies washing not to exceed 300 pounds per square inch, rinsing not to exceed 400 psi at about 4 gallons per minute, and a minimum distance of 18 inches between the nozzle tip and the masonry surface, with the gentlest methods tried first (US General Services Administration). A consumer machine from a big box store commonly runs several thousand psi. The gap between those two numbers is where mortar joints get eroded and water gets driven into cavities. Those figures cover masonry only, so fibre cement, vinyl and painted surfaces follow their own manufacturer guidance rather than these.
Stucco deserves its own caution, because it is common on Houston townhomes and it fails invisibly. For stucco the recommended approach is a low-pressure water wash supplemented by scrubbing with soft natural bristle brushes and possibly non-ionic detergents, and the reason to bother is that water infiltration causes wood lath to rot and metal lath and nails to rust, which eventually makes the stucco lose its bond (National Park Service, Preservation Brief 22).
Low pressure and the right cleaning solution do the work without any of that, which is why our house washing on attached properties is a soft wash rather than a blast.
The practical sequence for a Houston townhome
Read the declaration first and find out which regime you are in and who maintains the exterior. If it is a condominium, ask the association before arranging anything. If it is fee simple, check the covenants for architectural or appearance provisions.
Tell the neighbour on the other side of any shared wall what is happening and when. Sort out access across their ground in advance rather than on the morning. And insist that whoever does the work understands they are working on an attached structure, which rules out high pressure at the shared wall and anywhere near a window or door perimeter.
Narrow side yards are also why the upper elevations on a three-storey townhome usually have to be reached from the ground rather than from a ladder wedged into a four-foot gap. That applies to the glass as much as the walls, which is why our window cleaning on townhomes runs off water-fed poles.
If you are doing the front walkway or a patio yourself, the usual caution applies: the spray from a pressure washer can cause serious wounds that might first appear minor (CDC). Hard surfaces are the reasonable DIY job on a townhome, and our pressure washing crews pick up the parts that involve height, shared walls or an association in the conversation.
What to agree before anyone arrives
A short list settles almost every townhome job before it starts.
- Which elevations are in scope, named specifically rather than described as “the outside”. Front, rear, the party wall face if there is an accessible one, and the balcony or stoop.
- Where the water goes. On a small shared lot the runoff has somewhere to be, and a neighbour’s patio is not it.
- Whose ground the crew stands on, and whether that has been agreed with the person who owns it.
- What happens to anything shared, including a fence line, a gate, a shared drive or a common walkway that the work will cross.
- Photographs before starting. On an attached property this matters more than on a detached house, because a mark on a shared surface can turn into a question about who put it there. Five minutes with a phone protects everybody, including me.
If an association is involved, get its answer in writing rather than over a fence. Boards change, and a verbal approval from a neighbour who is on the board this year is not a record of anything.
A caveat to close on, and I would rather say it plainly than bury it. I clean buildings, I do not read declarations for a living, and nothing above is legal advice. The Texas State Law Library says it better than I can: it can tell you what the law says, but it cannot tell you what the law means for your situation. For that, your declaration and, if it matters enough, your attorney.
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References
- Texas State Law Library, General Information, Property Owners’ Associations, https://guides.sll.texas.gov/property-owners-associations
- Texas Property Code Chapter 82, Uniform Condominium Act, https://tcss.legis.texas.gov/resources/PR/htm/PR.82.htm
- Texas Property Code Chapter 209, Texas Residential Property Owners Protection Act, https://tcss.legis.texas.gov/resources/PR/htm/PR.209.htm
- Texas Property Code Chapter 202, Construction and Enforcement of Restrictive Covenants, https://tcss.legis.texas.gov/resources/PR/htm/PR.202.htm
- Texas Real Estate Research Center, Texas A&M University, POA Power Shift, https://trerc.tamu.edu/article/poa-power-shift-2337/
- Cornell Legal Information Institute, Wex, Party Wall, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/party_wall
- US General Services Administration, Cleaning Historic Masonry: Removal of Atmospheric Soiling, Stains, and Biological Growth, https://www.gsa.gov/real-estate/historic-preservation/historic-preservation-policy-tools/preservation-tools-resources/technical-procedures/cleaning-historic-masonry-removal-of-atmospheric-soiling-stains-and-biological-growth
- National Park Service, Preservation Briefs 6: Dangers of Abrasive Cleaning to Historic Buildings, https://www.nps.gov/orgs/1739/upload/preservation-brief-06-abrasive-cleaning.pdf
- National Park Service, Preservation Briefs 22: The Preservation and Repair of Historic Stucco, https://www.nps.gov/orgs/1739/upload/preservation-brief-22-stucco.pdf
- US CDC, Pressure Washer Safety, https://www.cdc.gov/natural-disasters/safety/pressure-washer-safety.html
