Deep Cleaning for a House That Needs a Full Reset

A deep clean is not a regular visit with more elbow behind it. It is a different list, and the hours land in places a weekly cleaning never has time to reach. Grout in a tile bath holds a gray film that a mop skates straight over, so it gets scrubbed line by line and rinsed rather than wiped. Silicone around a tub or a shower pan gets soap film and mildew worked out of it. The grease above a range is not one layer either. It is months of cooking gone tacky and holding dust, and it comes off the cabinet doors and the underside of the hood with a degreaser and real time, not a spray and a paper towel. Cabinet tops, the gap over the refrigerator and the last inch on top of each door get reached with a ladder instead of guessed at from the floor.

Old houses around here add their own list. Radiators and baseboard heat print a gray fan up the wall behind them by March, and that shadow comes off the paint by hand, worked downward so nothing streaks into what is already done. Baseboards in a 1900 Victorian run six or eight inches tall with a cap and a shoe, the door casings carry the same profile, and each one gets washed rather than flicked with a duster. Storm window tracks fill with grit, dead insects and paint chips over the winter, so they get vacuumed out before anything damp touches them. Light fixtures come down where they come down safely. Switch plates, handrails, the inside face of the entry door. Expect most of a day in a three bedroom, sometimes two people on it, and expect the walkthrough to set that before we start.

What the visit covers

• Scrub tile grout line by line, then rinse instead of wiping
• Work soap film and mildew out of tub and shower silicone
• Cut cooked grease from cabinet doors and the hood underside
• Ladder the cabinet tops and the gap over the refrigerator
• Hand wash the heat shadow off the wall above each radiator
• Wash wide baseboards, the cap and the shoe, room by room
• Wash door casings, door tops and both faces of the doors
• Vacuum storm window tracks before wiping sills and frames
• Pull the range out and clean the floor and wall behind it
• Take down reachable light fixtures and wash the glass shades

What a deep clean will not fix

Some things do not come back, and you should hear it before you pay for the hours. Silicone that has gone brown or black is stained through, not dirty. Mildew has grown into the seal where no product reaches, so scrubbing buys you a cleaner looking bead and nothing else. The real fix is cutting the old bead out and running a new one, and we will say so instead of billing four hours of scrubbing. Grout that has lost its seal behaves the same way. It cleans up and it looks much better, and it still reads darker in the traffic lane than it does under the cabinet. A porcelain tub with a worn glaze stays dull no matter what goes on it. Paint washed thin around a switch plate does not wash back.

The price follows the walkthrough. Somebody comes out, opens the bathrooms, looks at the kitchen and the trim, and asks what has been bothering you the longest. That is what sets the hours, because two houses with the same square footage can be a full day apart. You get one figure for the visit and a list of what it covers, area by area, so the cabinet tops are either in the price or they are not. Plenty of people book the reset once and then move onto a regular schedule, which costs less than deep cleaning twice a year. If a bathroom ceiling turns out to be peeling rather than dirty, you get a painting number for it instead of a promise that scrubbing will help.