Can a house under contract be cleaned?

A house under contract still looks like any other house from the driveway, but the right to change it before closing is shared out on paper.

• The contract and its parties. The purchase contract is the seller's and buyer's own document, so whether it permits, limits or says nothing about work before closing is read in that document, with the listing licensee and, where a clause needs interpreting, an attorney.
• The association. In a condominium the common elements are the association's to maintain, except limited common elements the declaration assigns to the unit owner; in a homeowners' association, appearance standards reach only as far as the declaration of covenants and its published guidelines state or reasonably infer.
• The sealer maker's clock. A paver sealing is not finished when the last coat goes on. The published dry and traffic times belong to the product on the ground, and a closing or walk-through has to fit around them.

None of those three is a cleaning company. An exterior cleaner describes what a cleaning does to a surface; it does not read a purchase contract, speak for an association or decide whether an inspection period has run. The sections below take each holder in turn, and every one of them ends in a document or a person to ask rather than a yes or a no printed here.

Two Florida statutes set out which association decisions reach the outside of a home, and a pending sale appears in neither sentence.

The condominium rule is one sentence. Florida Statutes 718.113(1) reads: “Maintenance of the common elements is the responsibility of the association, except for any maintenance responsibility for limited common elements assigned to the unit owner by the declaration.” The sentence says nothing about a sale. Which parts of a building are common elements, and which limited common elements the declaration gives the unit owner to maintain, is read in the declaration itself. Who orders roof work on a condominium building is taken up in full in who is responsible for cleaning a condominium roof.

For a house in a homeowners' association, Florida Statutes 720.3035(1)(a) ties the association's say over exterior appearance to what the declaration of covenants and its authorized guidelines state or reasonably infer, and the statute and how it reads on a paver job are set out under the association rules that apply to paver work in Naples. Whether a particular cleaning or sealer finish falls under those standards is answered by the declaration itself, not by the statute or by a cleaner.

Of the three surfaces, a paver sealing is the one that takes a driveway out of use, and the wait is printed by the people who write the specifications.

ICPI's Tech Spec 5 puts a condition on both sides of a sealing. Before it: “Allow at least 24 hours without moisture or surface dampness before application.” After it: “Prevent all traffic from entering the area until the sealer is completely dry, typically 24 hours.” Techniseal's paver protector table gives its own figures as “Pedestrian: 24 hrs” and “Vehicular: 48 to 72 hrs”. The dry time for any other sealer is on that product's label.

Those figures are the makers' and the institute's, and a wet week moves the first one, because rain or irrigation restarts the 24 hours without moisture. The other conditions ICPI attaches to the day, wind and over-application among them, are listed under the conditions and limits on a paver sealing day. Whether a sealer belongs on the pavers for a sale at all is answered separately, in whether pavers need to be sealed before selling a house.

A roof cleaning between contract and closing carries the same technical constraint it carries on any other day, plus a paperwork question that belongs to someone else.

The constraint is the glass below the roof. NGA names “Bleach (or other solutions containing sodium hypochlorite)” among the corrosive materials not to use on laminated glass, and says: “The plastic interlayer in laminated glass is generally exposed around the periphery of the window glass; cleaning fluids and their vapors must be kept away from this area.” Impact windows are built with laminated glass, as PGT states for its own hurricane windows and doors and Cardinal for its Sea-Storm glass, so solution drifting onto them matters to the glass itself, not only to how it looks. What that means for everything under a roof while the work happens is set out in what is under the roof during a soft wash, and the window maker's care guide is the document that says what a given unit tolerates.

The paperwork question is disclosure. Florida Statutes 475.278 lists among a transaction broker's duties “Disclosing all known facts that materially affect the value of residential real property and are not readily observable to the buyer”, and the single agent's duties carry the same line. That is the licensee's duty, not a cleaner's. How it meets a roof cleaning, alongside the buyer's insurer and inspector, is covered in what a roof cleaning changes when a house is sold.