The Legacy of Window Washing by Chris Wilson

Window Washing by Chris Wilson is not taking new clients. He owned a successful building maintenance company in Portland.

I washed my first window in 1979 at age 9 in an office building where my step-grandparents were cleaning for their son, my mother’s ex-husband, whose flashy, decadent ways captured my imagination as a child. I remember making a big smeary streaky mess with some towels and a bottle of blue spray. when I was done it didn’t look that great. Discouraged I went back to life of boyhood. At 11 I got my f

irst paper route delivering The Columbian to some low income apartments in Vancouver, Washington. This pretty much established my entrepreneurial spirit. At 15 I quit the paper route and mowed lawns for the summer. At 16 I took a job cleaning a 40,000 square foot office in suburban Oregon. And then when school started back up, I cleaned floors in the local Kmart early in the morning before class. Then late in my 17th year I started C&N Janitorial Service in Vancouver WA. The N stood for nobody, because I did it all myself pretty much. At 19 I got the contract to clean the windows for a small real estate office, so I bought some squeegees and a mop and attempted to do the work. Frustration ensued, but a friendly window cleaner happened by and taught me a few techniques that got the ball rolling. Then I washed my parents windows, my grandmas windows and picked up house clients and commercial jobs here and there. When I quit the janitorial racket in the mid 90s and went back to college to get my journalism BA and English minor from Washington State University, I kept my squeegees and would beat the mid-range to nicer residential neighborhoods in Pullman, Washington knocking door to door seeking travel bucks for clean windows. I always found all the work I needed to help pay for school, buy food and pay the rent and travel, and I built a small repeat client base while in college. I’ve been in California now for 12 years and over time I’ve picked up a client here and there from friends and talking with people, 99% residential with second story reach capacity. While I'm focused on cleaning the beautiful homes of the Ojai Valley, I've washed windows in Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico and a few places in Europe.

09/12/2022

I've recently learned the process for sending DMCA takedown notices and its been successful so I made a meme.

01/16/2019

I never imagined it would come to this. I just wanted to make a cool print for putting on t-shirts to wear while I washed windows for my clients in Ojai. That was late 2011 and I took at least 100 pictures of my fist holding different sized squeegees in various positions and poses. Then I went into photo editing software and blew out the contrast cleaned up the lines and made me a design. J. Racenstein picked it up right away and bought 100 shirts in various sizes. Then after licensing the SqueegeePower design to Window Cleaning Resource in 2014 to use as their corporate logo, it started coming to my attention every few weeks that other window cleaners were taking the design and using it as their own logo or design. Most of them, I believe, are doing it innocently. They or their graphic designers find the design somewhere online and then, thinking it is free clip art, paste it up on their company websites or on Facebook. And so now I occasionally have to play logo police and inform them that they are using copyrighted art. This has given me a lesson in intellectual property law. I've learned about the Berne Convention and what creative rights are protected under the international treaty.
I now feel it is necessary to put the © on the design and publish this notice here, on Instagram and on my blog at windowashing.com that the SqueegeePower, Squeegeelution, Squeegeelicious design have been submitted to the US Copyright Office for official registration. It's copyrighted and trade marked by windowcleaner.com for exclusive use. Unless you have express permission from Chris or Alex Lambrinides to use the design, please don't be lazy. It's a small industry and we're all doing the best that we can to make a living with the products, services and creative efforts we are putting forward. Thank you.
Yours truly in good faith and best fortune, Chris T. Wilson

11/29/2017

I accept bitcoin.

Instagram post by Chris T. Wilson • Aug 31, 2017 at 8:27am UTC

08/31/2017

I call it the Summerland Sling. https://www.instagram.com/p/BYc5Fqxgvds/

Instagram post by Chris T. Wilson • Aug 31, 2017 at 8:27am UTC 90 Likes, 7 Comments - Chris T. Wilson () on Instagram: “Seems like ”

08/05/2017

Oh to be a window cleaner yesterday. https://youtu.be/jVDP9nPoIfc

Window Cleaner, 1940's - Film 1467 Window Cleaner in a rubber harness cleans the windows of skyscrapers in New York. Street level 5th Avenue with shop windows being washed. Metropolitan Museum...