Bundling exterior jobs onto one visit: the 5–15% you leave on the table
Bundling services onto one visit saves 5–15% against booking them one at a time, because you pay for one set-up, one travel leg and one access arrangement instead of three. The natural pairs: house wash with windows, gutters with roof, driveway with fence, solar while the roof crew is already up there. Order matters — glass goes last.
The tax you never see itemised
Every visit carries a fixed cost before anyone touches your house. The van gets loaded and driven. Someone finds parking on a street that doesn't want them there. Ladders come off the rack, the gate key gets sorted, the dog gets negotiated with, the neighbour gets asked about their driveway. Water and power get located. That is the better part of an hour before the first clean thing happens — and you pay for it whether the crew is here for one job or four.
Book those four jobs across four separate mornings and you pay that set-up four times, at full rate each time. Window cleaning starts at $150, gutter cleaning at $180, a house soft wash at $300, driveway cleaning at $180. Nothing about those numbers changes when they are bundled. What changes is everything around them. Put the work on one visit and the total drops 5 to 15 per cent. It is not a loyalty gesture. It is the honest cost of not driving here three more times.
The pairs that belong on the same visit
House wash and windows is the obvious pair, and the one we run most. The walls get soft washed, the frames and sills get the same treatment, and the glass gets cleaned afterwards on surfaces that are already clean. Gutters and roof is the second: the crew is up there anyway, harnessed and set, and clearing a gutter without looking at the roof feeding it is half a job. Both pairs share the hardest part of the day — getting safely to height and staying there.
Driveway and fence go together for the same reason at ground level: one machine, one water source, one long run of hose, two surfaces that read as a single frontage from the street. Solar is the sleeper. If a crew is already on the roof for gutters or a roof clean, the panels are a short extension of a job that has mostly been paid for — versus a dedicated visit that exists only to get someone back up there again.
Anything that rinses down goes before the glass
There is one rule and it is not negotiable: anything that rinses down happens before the glass. Roof and gutters first, because everything they hold comes off the edge and lands on the walls. Walls next. Driveways, paths and fences after that, since pressure cleaning throws fine grit further than people expect. Glass last, always. Clean the windows in the morning and soft wash the walls at lunchtime and you have paid for windows twice — once for us, once for the run marks.
This is the part separate contractors cannot give you. Three companies on three different days share no order of operations, and the last one to arrive inherits whatever the previous two left behind. Nobody is at fault. There is simply no sequence. One crew on one visit works to a running order, and the person cleaning your glass is the person who knows exactly what was sprayed above it and how long ago. The saving is money. The sequencing is the quality.
What a bundle will not do
A discount is not a reason to buy a service. Cadences genuinely differ — glass wants doing two or three times a year, gutters once or twice depending on your trees, a roof clean every few years at most. Dragging a roof forward eighteen months to catch a bundle rate is not a saving; it is spending money early for a smaller number. Bundle what is due. Let the rest fall due on its own schedule, then bundle it with whatever else is ready by then.
Bundling also does not change the physics. Two storeys still adds roughly 40 per cent to windows and a house wash, and about 50 per cent to gutters, because height is the cost. Roof, solar, sandstone and fence work are still priced per job — pitch, growth, access and material decide it. And a bundle cannot make cleaning fix what cleaning does not fix: chalked paint, salt-fretted sandstone, glass already etched by years of run-off. One visit, same honest limits.
One visit, or the standing version of it
If your house needs this more than once a year, the Plan is the same idea running on a schedule. Keep at $89 a month, Care at $179, Full Schmick at $329. Every visit is a bundle by design, with the sequencing already worked out and the same operator turning up — the one who remembers which downpipe blocks first and which sill holds water. You stop deciding what to book each season. The order of operations stops being your problem.
Either way, do not take 5 to 15 per cent on faith. Put the jobs you are actually considering into the instant quote — tick windows, gutters, the house wash, whatever is on the list — and it returns a firm, bookable price in about 60 seconds with the bundle already in it. Then compare that against the same services booked one at a time. If the bundle does not win for your place, we would rather you knew before the van left.