Apartment and Condo Cleaning Built for the Building

The converted mills along the canals in downtown Lowell and Lawrence clean differently than a house does. Ceilings run twelve or fourteen feet, the windows take up most of a wall, and the brick and the duct work are left exposed on purpose. That brick is the reason people buy the unit and it also sheds. Fine masonry dust settles on the ledge of every window opening, along the top edge of exposed steel and across the duct overhead, then drops onto a concrete or wide plank floor where it reads as a gray cast. Water turns it into a smear, so it comes off dry first, vacuumed with a brush head on a pole, and only then wiped. The glass is the other thing. Tall windows with deep sills catch everything, and in a unit with that much of them, glass is not a five minute item at the end.

Elevator buildings and newer condo conversions come with their own set of facts, and none of them are about cleaning. There are hours when work is allowed. There is a freight elevator that has to be reserved, sometimes days ahead, and a service entrance that is the only door a cart is getting through. There is a loading zone that is either open or is not. There is a management office that wants a certificate of insurance on file before anybody rides up. We settle all of that before the first visit rather than discovering it in the lobby holding a vacuum. Name the building at the walkthrough and we will call the office ourselves. Once your unit has a slot, the crew knows the code, the elevator and the parking, and the visit stops being a negotiation at the front desk.

What the visit covers

• Dry vacuum brick ledges and beams before anything gets wiped
• Pole dust exposed duct, sprinkler lines and light track
• Clean the tall window glass, the deep sills and the frames
• Damp mop sealed concrete and wide plank floors, then dry them
• Wipe the inside of the entry door, the handle and the buzzer
• Clean the island, the backsplash and the appliance fronts
• Clean the bathroom top to bottom, including the exhaust cover
• Clean in and around a stacked washer and dryer closet
• Wipe the balcony door track and sweep the balcony floor
• Reserve the freight elevator and clear the visit with the office

Common areas and association work

Associations and management companies hire us for the parts of a building nobody owns on their own. Lobbies, mail rooms, hallway carpet, stairwells, the elevator cab and its door track, the fitness room, the trash room and the glass on every entry. That work runs on its own schedule, usually early morning or evening so residents are not walking around a mop, and it gets priced by the building instead of by the hour. Frequency goes in writing per area, because lobby glass in a busy entry is a twice a week item while a fitness room is closer to daily and a stairwell is not. Boards want that written down for the same reason we do. We are licensed and insured, and the association gets that paperwork before the first shift.

Inside the units, the biggest difference from a house is the entry. Everything a building tracks in arrives through one lobby and one hallway, so in winter the grit at your door is worse than it would be at a front walk. That makes the mat, the hall runner and the first few feet of your floor the part of the visit anybody notices. Storage is the other difference. Very few apartments have a closet to spare for supplies and nobody wants a vacuum living in the hall, so everything the crew needs comes up with them and goes back down with them. If you rent, the scope stops at your door and the common areas stay with whoever the building pays for them, unless the office asks us to cover both.