Recovering From Halloween Pranks

As a commercial property manager you may view Halloween celebrations with a different thought process than most folks.  The morning after can bring many “pranks” to light.

In a perfect world, kids who love donning costumes and trick-or-treating on Halloween night will never turn into teenagers who love to use the occasion to vandalize their neighbors. But it seems an eternal rite of passage and one that can leave you with a serious mess to clean up.

Hopefully decorating trees and shrubs with toilet paper, smashing easy-to-get-to pumpkins, and perhaps tossing a few eggs are the worst it really gets.  Few teens are devoted enough to a lot of damage. In our urban areas, pranksters' activities intensify, and they spend the night soaping windows, throwing toilet paper, ringing doorbells and running away.

Toilet Paper Attack
Harmless but unsightly, toilet paper is pretty easy to clean up as long as it doesn’t get wet first, in which case it turns into papier mâché and haunts you for months to come. So don’t be tempted to try and hose it off, and make sure you get rid of it before the next rain. Arm yourself with gloves, long sticks, and garbage bags to stuff the TP into; your local recycler will probably accept it. Unwind and collect as much as you can reach, using the sticks to lift and loosen streamers out of your reach. If you have tall trees and your perp had a good throwing arm, there may be some you just can’t get to without resorting to extraordinary measures. Don’t do anything rash, such as climbing up the tree (and falling out). Eventually, the stuff will break down and disappear.

The Old Egg Toss
The residue from the eggs needs to be washed of any surface as soon as possible.  Eggs can damage some surfaces in just a few hours, and once it dries, it's hard to remove.

Soaping Windows
For some bizarre reason, kids seem to think it's funny to rub a bar of soap all over your car's or your windows to make it hard to see out. Water and a rough sponge should get most of it off, but if the mess isn’t yielding to water and elbow grease, it may be that the perpetrator used a candle or block of paraffin wax instead. Carefully use a single-edged razor blade to remove as much of the wax as possible from hard, smooth surfaces such as glass (if it’s warm out, you can harden the wax by rubbing it with an ice cube first). Remove any remaining residue with a cloth soaked in rubbing alcohol.

Or you can let Greens Keeper Landscape Maintenance do all the post Halloween clean-up work for you and take the burden off your shoulders all together.  Give us a call at 623-848-8277 and let’s talk about it.

Presented by:
Greens Keeper Landscape Maintenance, LLC
623-848-8277
http://www.commerciallandscapecare.com
greenskeeperllc@cox.net