We clean every room top to bottom

Deep cleaning reaches what regular visits skip

A regular clean keeps a house in good shape from one visit to the next. It takes care of the surfaces you see and touch every day. A deep clean is for what builds up underneath and behind those surfaces over months. Think of the sticky film on the cabinet doors beside the stove, or the soap scum worked into the grout lines of the shower.

We work from the top of each room down, and the floors always come last. Ceiling fans and the tops of door frames get dusted first, because that dust has to fall somewhere. Next come the cabinet fronts and the window sills. After that we get down on the baseboards and wipe them by hand. The floor is the last thing we touch in a room, so nothing lands on it once it is clean.

If you skip that order, you end up cleaning things twice. Dust a ceiling fan after the floor is mopped and gray fluff lands on the wet floor. Wipe a dusty baseboard with a wet cloth before vacuuming it and the dust turns into a muddy streak that dries along the paint. In the bathroom, cleaner sprayed on tile and wiped off right away barely touches soap scum. It needs a few minutes to soften the film before the brush goes in.

• Ceiling fans and light fixtures dusted
• Cabinet fronts and handles degreased
• Baseboards wiped by hand in every room
• Tub and shower grout scrubbed with a brush
• Window sills and tracks cleaned out

Kitchen grease builds up on cabinet doors

Every time something cooks on the stove, a little grease rises with the steam and settles on whatever is nearby. The cabinet doors on either side of the range take most of it, along with the handles and the top of the range hood. It goes on so thin that nobody notices at first. Then dust sticks to it, and over time the doors feel tacky and look dull even right after a wipe.

We take that film off with a degreaser and a soft cloth, working one door at a time from the top edge down. The handles get the same treatment, since they carry oil from hands as well as from cooking. Then every door gets a second wipe with clean water. If the degreaser is left on, the door stays a little sticky and collects new dust faster than it did before.

Many of the colonials and raised ranches around Bellingham have wood kitchen cabinets, either stained oak or painted. Wood does not like to be soaked. Water that sits in the seams of a door, or along the bottom edge of a painted cabinet, can lift the finish and swell the wood. So the cloth gets wrung out nearly dry, and we wipe with the grain instead of scrubbing in circles. The tops of the upper cabinets get cleaned too, where sticky dust has sat untouched the longest.

We scrub grout with a stiff brush

Grout is porous, so soap scum and body oil soak into it instead of sitting on top. A sponge slides right over the lines and only cleans the tile face beside them. To get grout clean, the cleaner has to sit long enough to loosen what is in it. Then a stiff brush works along each line, and the whole wall gets rinsed so no residue is left behind to catch the next shower's soap.

Massachusetts summers are humid, and many bathrooms in older capes and colonials have a small window or a weak exhaust fan. Shower steam has nowhere to go, so it settles on the ceiling and in the corners of the tub. In winter the window stays shut, which makes it worse. That is where the black spots show up first, in the grout near the shower floor and along the caulk line. We treat those spots directly and dry the surface when we finish.

Cleaning has limits, and you should know them before we start. If mildew has grown behind the caulk, the black shows through from underneath, and no amount of scrubbing reaches it. If grout is cracked or crumbling, a brush will pull more of it out. In both cases we clean what can be cleaned and tell you what we saw. Then you can decide whether the caulk or grout needs to be redone.

Winter leaves more dust inside Bellingham homes

From fall into spring the windows stay closed and the heat runs. Many houses around here heat with hot water baseboard units along the outside walls. The metal fins inside those covers catch dust and pet hair all season. When the heat comes on, warm air carries some of that dust back into the room. Houses with forced hot air push it out through the vents instead, and it settles along the edges of every floor.

Baseboards are the part of a room nobody looks at until they look bad. We vacuum them first with a brush attachment to lift loose dust out of the corners and the groove along the top edge. Then we wipe them by hand with a damp cloth. We vacuum the heater covers the same way, along with the fins behind them that we can reach without taking anything apart. Done right, the paint looks even from one end of the wall to the other.

Winter dirt also comes in on boots. Road salt and sand get tracked in through the front door and the garage entry. The salt dries into a white haze on tile and wood floors. Sweeping alone just moves it around, so those floors get a damp mop and a clean water rinse. The windows need attention too. On cold mornings, condensation runs down the glass and pools on the sills, and the tracks underneath grow black mildew by spring. We clean those tracks out and wipe the sills dry.