Today’s consumer power washers are good cleaning tools but you can also have some fun with them and add a decorative flair to your home. Just about any type of small to medium pressure washer should work for this project, no matter how low the psi might be. With a little imagination and creativity you can use a pressure or power washer to clean the sidewalks and pavements around your home and also leave some fun designs on your cement. There are no chemicals involved, it’s completely temporary and kind of fun!

Even a little hand held power washer like this one from Amazon is powerful enough to make artistic designs on cement and concrete.

First, before you go playing with your power washer, be safe. Power washers, even the little home units, are dangerous tools that can seriously hurt someone. Never aim a power washer at a person or animals, always wear goggles or safety glasses when using them and be very vigilant about what you are washing because you could be damaging something without even knowing it. If you have corded power washer then you also need to be extra careful about mixing water with any electrical tool.

Okay, so I’ve been trying to get my house ready for a party we’re having at our home for my son’s third birthday. Like all kid’s birthday parties these days, it has to have a theme. This year’s birthday party theme is Mickey Mouse and Friends which my son has been nuts about since we took a short visit to Disney World earlier this summer. My wife and I are going all out with the Mickey Mouse wrapping paper, parties supplies, Mickey Mouse cake and so forth.

This end of summer party is always a good motivator for me to get the house fixed up and it’s a large part of the reason of why I painted my house this summer and why I’m trying to get my basement remodeling project moving along. Every year around this time I pull out my power washer and wash all the sidewalks and small patio spaces around my home. Power washing is one of those jobs that’s fun for the first ten minutes but quickly gets a bit monotonous, especially when you have a lot of surface to clean one inch at a time.

Voila! A temporary “hidden” Mickey made with a power washer!

As I was slowly sweeping back and forth across my cement steps my mind wandered to our Disney World trip and how we all had fun looking for “Hidden Mickeys” all around the amusement park. Hidden Mickeys are little designs, just three overlapping circles that look like the Mickey Mouse symbol, that are “hidden” in all sorts of places like paint designs, landscaping layouts and even in the way some of the restaurants arrange food on a plate, like overlapping three pancakes into a Mickey shape. And that’s when it hit me: I could make some “hidden” Mickeys on my sidewalk with my power washer! Last year I had power washed my son’s name into the sidewalk, but that was freehand and a little messy. A design template can provide a much neater result. You can do this with just about any design, but the Mickey Mouse symbol was pretty easy to do, so I’ll show you how I did it.

You can sketch all sorts of designs into concrete with a power washer and, as long as you’re just cleaning off the grime and not actually harming the cement, then all your designs will be temporary and will only last until the surface gets dirty again or until you power wash off the designs.

To make a decorative power washer design you’ll want to first choose a decent surface to work with. In my limited experience I’ve found that a smooth cement or concrete surface works a little better than a bumpy one and the surface should obviously be in good repair. It should also be sufficiently dirty and stained so that a good power washing will turn the concrete at least several noticeable shades lighter. The darker your “grime” and the lighter the surface, the more contrast you’ll have in your designs. For my Mickey Mouse designs I used a light bumpy “stony” sidewalk that hadn’t been power washed in a year.

Just hold down the template and power wash around it.

After choosing a surface you’ll want to build some sort of a template for your power washer design. You simply need to make something that will prevent part of the cement surface from being touched with the power washer. That means that you’ll probably want to make something that’s sturdy enough to stand up to a power washing and you’ll need to have some way of keeping it steady and in place while you’re power washing over it.

For my Mickey Mouse symbols I took three pull-off cat food lids and taped them together in overlapping circles, so they looked like Mickey Mouse. In the photos I used painter’s tape to keep them together, but after one blasting my power washer pretty much shredded the tape, so I then remade them with a heavy foil tape that stood up to multiple uses. Here are the general steps for power washing decorative designs into a sidewalk:

1. Make a design template out of metal or wood. Aluminum can tops worked well for me, so you could probably cut shapes out of aluminum flashing or even use sturdy blocks of wood, but most power washers can wear away wood at close range.

2. To keep your template from moving around you’ll either have to weigh it down or hold it down with some pressure. I just held my cat food can lids in place with a stick of plastic PVC pipe I had sitting around.

3. Start up your power washer and simply moved back and forth over the template in a smooth and steady fashion. For the best results shoot straight down on the template with your power washer. Shooting at an angle might push water under the edges of the template and make your outcome blurry or faded.

4. You’re done when the area around the template are clean. Lift it up and see what your pattern looks like!

Who needs cement stamping when you can give your patio or cement pavement a temporary tattoo?!

Obviously, you can use just about anything for a power washing etching pattern. Again, I could see cutting shapes out of aluminum flashing, but I think you could also use some of those decorative metal yard signs or even thick rubber welcome mats with the fancy designs as a template. Choose Mickey Mouse because it was easy to experiment with and I figured my three-year-old would like it.

In my experience a good power washing etching might be visible for a good six months if left totally alone. This depends a lot on the surface your etch on and how dirty it gets in a typical year.

My front sidewalk is under a lot of trees, so it gets pretty dark pretty quickly. I suspect my little sidewalk Hidden Mickeys will be mostly unnoticeable by spring of next year, but that just leaves me time to think up some more power washing design ideas!

Anyone else out there ever created any cool designs or art with a power washer? Send photos or links to your power washer sidewalk art!