The Holidays are a great time to clean, as though you didn’t have enough to do.  When you move the couch to put up the Christmas Tree, or clear the mantle, you find dust, stains, or grimy corners. You have more to do than chase the dirt so in many cases you call in a cleaner.

This year let me suggest you wait until after the Holidays and clean when you are putting it all back together. Cleaners are cheaper then. The other thing is that no matter how clean you get the house before the Holidays it will be trashed after. Many people think they need the house cleaned for relatives, but I have found that relatives that are visiting you are less concerned with the cleanliness than the owners.

Anyway, we get ready by first vacuuming the whole house. Then we move what we need to. We have a set of book cases and a mantle that we decorate so we dust all of that and anywhere else as we move stuff out of the way. It actually gets to be kind of contagious with us. The decorations take over the house so we have been pretty good about getting everything dusted. When it’s all in place we vacuum again.

Now the kitchen for sure will get trashed so don’t get carried away. I take a damp cloth and wipe everything down, spray it all with Windex, wipe it again with the rinsed damp cloth, and dry with another clean cloth. You can do the same with the bathroom. Just kind of move stuff around, the Windex dries quick.

These are just some tricks to get you through the Holiday. They should be used sparingly and of course hire a cleaner if you are feeling overwhelmed. The big push to get a cleaning done should be when you are getting ready for Spring. It is just around the corner.

It’s December and time to start thinking about Spring. We will have some freezing weather, maybe some snow, and then it will be a long wet winter here in Seattle. This post is going to be linked to my blog at www.BuyingSeattle.com which is more Real Estate related. The Spring Cleaning part just seemed to fit better here.

The time to start is immediately after the freeze. As the temperature begins to rise a little bit and we are sure there is no more frost, that is the time to start pruning trees, and bushes. The second thing to do is kill mildew and moss. I mix bleach with water and some laundry detergent, or some of that citrus orange cleaner you get at Home Depot. The bleach is about 25/75 up to 50/50 bleach to water. I add the detergent simply for the wetting agents, it also helps to see where you have been.

I use a garden sprayer to apply the bleach solution to the deck, fencing, siding, walk ways, stairs, or anywhere else moss or mildew are a problem. The 50/50 solution is more for the mossy areas. The important thing is to uniformly apply the solution. I go around the house a couple of times. It’s hard to keep pumping up the garden sprayer, so at a tool rental place there is a thing called a juice box. It’s made for spraying trees. It can be electric, or a back pack with a side handle.

While you are at the rental place they will try to rent you a pressure washer with a chemical attachment. You don’t want that. It takes the bleach about thirty minutes to work. That’s one of the reasons I go around the house a couple of times. You will want a wand that can spray the upper areas of the house from the ground. Start high and work your way down.

After the house is saturated then you rise it with a garden hose and nozzle. You are rinsing mainly for uniformity. You can just leave the bleach solution, it turns to salt water, but you will want to dilute the alkaline for your Spring plant sakes. Some areas you will want to agitate with a broom which you can rinse in a bucket of the bleach solution.

Your going to want an overcast day that won’t be raining. It’s perfectly OK for it to rain later. It’s perfectly fine to pressure wash later also. Pressure washing takes some patience. I’ll probably do a whole post about pressure washing, but the thing to remember is to avoid using the pressure on your house. A pressure washer’s effectiveness is the gallons per minute it delivers. Like the river that created the Grand Canyon, it’s the flow of the water that does the work.

There is a trend in house cleaning to use all green products. Our company went down this road a few years ago to find we were working harder and cleaning less. You can do a lot with baking soda, citrus juice, and vinegar. What we found is there are grease, mildew, and bacteria smells that can be a bother.

The bathroom and kitchen are really well served by some Windex and Comet cleanser. The glass cleaner we use leaves a streak free shine. We use a little Pine Sol and water to kill bacteria in the bathroom. There are just some things that the chemicals are good for.

We did go through a period of using a recognized name of green cleaning products, but they rely heavily on perfumes. We noticed a kind of greasy build up after a while. They provide a great daily cleaner that we still use. We could make it ourselves however for a fraction of the cost. Which brings me to my opinions about house cleaning company products.

Your first week in business you are contacted by a half a dozen companies who are selling cleaning product concentrates. These you mix up in the bottles provided. There are also green products that come the same way. The problem is the consistency of the products. We need for every one to be comfortable with what we are using in the home. That’s why we use national brands.

Consumer cleaning products have come a long way. Many products want to be recognized for the way they use green cleaning technologies. We are also aware that green cleaning products can be very inexpensive. We would love to only use vinegar, or baking soda. They are extremely cheap. We have found that we need to work harder and longer to get results. Many customers complained about smells or mildew. Even the people who requested all green cleaning would ask if maybe every once in a while we could use some Comet in the tub, or kitchen sink.

In the next few years there will be more advancement with cleaning products. I think we all want to do more for the environment. The way I look at it, with all the germs, mold, and bacteria we concerned about it is better to be safe all the way around and use what we know will be helpful.

One of the things that’s important that you can do and your house cleaner probably doesn’t have time for is cleaning your over the stove grease traps. It’s really simple to take the vent covers off and put them in the dishwasher. In some cases they can just as easily be replaced.

Kitchen grease can get everywhere in the house. The most common complaint is about the kitchen cabinet doors. When they get greasy they smudge. It can take a few cleanings to get them to look good. Some times it’s a constant battle because people don’t use the fans when cooking or boiling water.

The noise is a distraction, for sure. Some houses have the vent or fan in the wall or ceiling. It’s important though that you have the air flow to get as much grease out of the kitchen as possible.

A fairly new client has contacted us by e-mail the past couple of cleanings because some things have come up. Without going into details about this very nice young couple I want to make some broad statements. The point will be the same.

When we break something we will tell you. I for one may forget things from time to time, but if we broke it, I’ll tell you. We’ll make it right. Some of the other questions have to do with the cat getting out, or paper work, or shoes that can’t be found. A client called to ask where his car keys were and I pointed out he came back to the house after we left.

There is a level of trust that needs to be established in your relationship with your house cleaner. We talk with the people who work with us about establishing that bond. For the house cleaners part, they are there to help you rather than sabotage your tranquility. The goal is for you to come home to a fresh, clean smelling home that takes away anxiety.

Most of the time, after a few months, it goes one of two ways, and hardly any in between. Some people get the house ready for the house cleaner and others just leave a mess as it lies. Surprisingly it’s the one’s who prepare the house who have the most lost items. They get rushed or have an order about things and if those things get moved around it’s a problem. It’s the same for the things that get broken.  The second camp, which can include the people who live in controlled chaos, we have an easier time falling into a pattern with. We try to get them organized and that includes leaving things where they can find them.

The most important point is establishing the trust that your house cleaner is there to help.

House Cleaners charge between $15 to $42 per hour, depending on the difficulty of cleaning, services provided, experience, and company structure.

Let’s work backward with company structure, a full service cleaning company, licensed, bonded, and insured, who hires employees that they pay well will be at the top of the price structure. A lot is made of back ground checks of the employees, and the ability to carry high insurance costs. I’m personally in favor of companies that have a back ground you can trust.

Next you have the smaller companies. These are the companies who keep like twenty full time workers in the field. The also do the back ground checks, have insurance, and are trustworthy, but they are paying a premium to keeping the workers in the field. They will charge less.

Then you have a mom and pop operations that may have the kids or other family working in the business. They may have workers, usually less than six, or ten. Lastly you have individuals who may work in teams of two or three.

I started using the term workers about half way through this because there are two ways of getting cleaners to you. One is by employee status, the other by contracted labor. There can be a difference depending on how the owners handle to work.

Having employees means to direct the conduct, uniform, work performed, and schedule. Contract labor is independent from the company owner. You work with the contractor directly, and direct the efforts. Both systems have tax structures, but for you, as the consumer, both systems have attributes. You may want to direct the independent contractor, or you may like that you never need to think about how your house gets cleaned as long as it’s done well.

Individual cleaners usually start out at between $15 to $20 per hour per person. Some carry insurance, supply equipment, and products. Most just show up to clean and you supply everything. There are some referral companies who just take a per cent age.

Next leap up is the $25 to $30 per person range. This is actually the most common for small companies. You will want to know about the structure of supervision. Do the owners work in the business? Is there a field supervisor or is there a team leader? The big question at this point is if the same people will always be showing up.

Now we are in the company profile section of between $30 to $42 per hour. This year there has been some price cutting because the construction cleaning was billed out at the highest rate. Detail cleaning is a pain, and not very profitable. You have to charge a high, premium price, for detail cleaning, that’s the $42 range. In some regularly scheduled cleaning companies a higher price is charged for the amount of paper work and scheduling.

Scheduling deserves it’s own paragraph because it is one of the most costly things about a cleaning service. Having your cleaner at one place at a certain time is difficult. Aside from traffic, cleaning is a very fluid, labor intensive, job that requires some time flexibility. If the cleaner goes into your home and finds the tub surround with hard water staining you’re going to want that cleaned. If your cleaner tells you they have to go, to be some place else at a certain time, you get miffed. So we all want the time to be constrained to a schedule as long as it’s our time schedule. You pay a premium for that.

More importantly to the $30 to $42 range is the amount of money, taxes, insurance, and bonding takes, along with the support staff to keep everything moving. Field supervisers, and the office manager are big expenses that you want. The hourly charge needs to cover those expenses. There are ways to cut corners, but most of the time the cost savings to you, the individual are pretty small.

To get high quality professional service in Seattle the going rate today is about $36 per hour. This is the mid point of real companies and a price point of about $110 per hour for a team of three, and $75 for a team of two. An individual you would be paying less and usually around $25 per hour.

Just as a plug for our business model we find that three people teams work best. One in the kitchen, one in the bath, and one person dusting and vacuuming. We are based on volume and a couple of teams for about eight houses per day. A two person team kind of tops out at three houses per day and after that the quality goes down. We can keep a three person team fresher, longer.

An individual can also do two houses per day, but we have found that almost any house takes at least three man hours to clean well. As the weeks, and months drag on the individual takes on a helper because they just can’t do it any longer. The individual house cleaner is a post for another time because they are the back bone of the industry.

Anyway I hope this gets you to a point where you can ask the right questions when you hire a professional cleaner.

The most request we are getting in new construction properties is to clean the grout. That can be done with a muriatic acid wash, maybe some hydrogen peroxide, or phosphoric acid in a commercial product like Ka-Boom. What works best is to steam clean the grout, and maybe scrub it a little.

Most carpet steam cleaning vans now have that attachment, so do it at the same time as some upholstery, or traffic pattern cleaning.

The question people ask is why the grout discolors. The answer is simply because builders don’t want to spend the extra $125 per unit to seal grout. In any new tile job you need to let the grout cure for a few days before you seal it. You can put a coat on right away, but it’s pretty meaningless. It either will not absorb, or it will be diluted by the water in the grout. Two applications are also best, kind of like with paint, a primer coat, then a finish.

The grout also needs to be maintained over time. regular washing, some bleaching, some re grouting and sealing can keep a shower or bath look like new for a thousand years. We have one client who uses a wax on the tile and grout. It’s a product sold in many stores.

Your cleaner can not fix tile and grout issues, and very seldom are they the cause of grout failure. They can however help to add years of use by keeping ahead of the cleaning.

Something that has come up in the past few weeks is the vent in the range hood, micro wave, or wall. The entire idea of using it is to get grease contained in one area in the kitchen. Some people like the peace an quiet of having bacon sizzle on the grill, but you house is filling with grease and smoke particles.

A client hired us because because the previous cleaner never got the house truly clean. The living room window sills were loaded with grease that the cleaner had used Pledge on. It just compounded the problem. One of the things we talk about is both cleaning and dusting flat surfaces. I prefer a wet and dry rag method and other of our cleaners prefer Windex. In the kitchen I use a combination of both a damp rag and Windex then polish with a dry rag.

The actual point of this post was to talk about cleaning the vent filters. It’s a routine like the filters in your furnace. they should all be check twice a year at lease and changed or cleaned. If you have the small single layer micro wave filters you can only clean them for so long, you should replace them if they are worn out. For more commercial filters they can go in the dish washer. Be sure to dry them out well, really well before using them again.

This is the most important thing a cleaner can bring to your home. We use the Sanitaire upright and the Riccar cannister vacuums. There are other brand names such as Miele that are top of the line. We have a tendency to go through vacuums pretty quick so we buy what works, is reasonably priced, and semi disposable. When you haul a vacuum around it can look more worn than it actually is. We also have the vacuums on for several hours every day, so we have different expectations.

Now for the plug:

Quality Sewing and Vacuum in Ballard is the place to make a vacuum decision. You have to see a vacuum in order to make the purchase that is right for you. We tried half a dozen makes and models before settling on our choices. You have special requirements and your home may need more attachments for different things. Prices are all over the map.

So rather than me give you details about vacuums I connected a link to the Quality Sewing and Vacuum site on the side bar.

Let me also say that the place in Ballard has Shane Banks who is one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve ever met about vacuums. Other stores have more emphasis on sewing so it’s worth the trip to:

Quality Sewing and Vacuum

1428 NW 56th

Seattle Washington 98107

In front of Ballard Market on 15th Avenue North West

206-782-9400

qualitysew.ballard@gmail.com

One of my colleagues corrected me about my two previous posts. She told me I was talking about straightening up rather than organizing. Organizing has a long range purpose, a plan associated with it. Straightening is one of the things cleaners do to make a house look pretty.

We’ve been told to leave desks alone, or certain areas of the kitchen. There are some private places in every home. Books, or the way things are laid out on a table are a couple of things that most people agree are fair game. What we discuss a lot in our company is that some people have the ability to lay things out well and others just kind of move things around.

We have a woman who works with us who is great at making a room look like it should. I have never been able to duplicate what she does. It’s an intangible. When you stand in a room once she’s done you can sense everything is in the proper place. She has an ability to take it all in and think of the entire room. She does this while she is dusting. She leaves things where she finds them, she just makes them fit together as best they can.

An organizer comes in to rearrange things. It’s a make over that brings the design sense and functionality of the professional into a home or room. A greater trick is to get systems in place.

A true organizer will have things set up so the person living in the home can maintain the look of being organized. That means bins, or shelves, places for everything, and everything in it’s place. We maintain some homes in that way, but very seldom is there a clear plan for things. We are, in many cases, the plan. We set up little routines in a home for “straightening” things where they lie.