Take an Acton House One Village at a Time

Acton never built one downtown, it built villages, and the housing in each of them comes from a different era. Acton Center and the roads around it hold colonial and Federal houses with hand planed trim, plaster over lath and clapboard carrying more coats than anybody counted. South Acton grew up around mills on Fort Pond Brook, so the stock there sits closer together and smaller, worker housing on stone foundations with narrow stairs, painted brick chimneys and porches taking weather from three sides. West Acton is village houses on small lots near the avenue. North Acton is condominium and townhouse blocks that went up much later, drywall inside and vinyl outside, where a trustee or a management company decides when work happens. An old village house is slow work by nature: the detail lives in the sash, the casing and the door panel, and a coating older than 1978 gets a lead question before a sander leaves the truck. A condominium block is fast work, and what the money buys there is a straight line at the ceiling and a film thick enough to wash. Frost treats every one of them the same way, lifting steps, settling walks and cracking a chimney crown on the oldest house and the newest one alike.

Kelley's Corner, where Route 111 crosses Route 27, is where most of the commercial calls come from. It is a run of plazas and standalone buildings holding retail, a pharmacy, quick service kitchens, a bank, dental and medical practices and small offices upstairs, and each of them goes dark at a different hour. Retail wants us gone before the first customer. Kitchens hand over the floor after the last order, with the hood, the splash wall and the quarry tile grout degreased and dry ahead of a delivery truck. Practices give up a Friday evening into Saturday, because the rooms have to be dry and back in service on Monday morning. Village storefronts in West Acton and South Acton are older and tighter, with apartments above the shop and no service door at the back, so loading in happens through the front and the sidewalk stays clear the whole time. School buildings are the largest single block of work in town, and all of it belongs to July and August, which is why a wing gets scoped in the spring and the materials are staged before the last bus pulls out in June.

What we take on in Acton

• House cleaning, deep cleans and recurring visits
• Move in and move out cleaning for owners and landlords
• Post construction and renovation handover cleaning
• Pre sale cleaning before the photos and the first showing
• Interior and exterior painting, and cabinet refinishing
• Repointing, chimneys, steps, walkways and patios
• Pressure washing for siding, driveways, decks and storefronts
• Offices, retail, practices and restaurants around your hours
• Common areas and unit turnovers for property managers

Getting a price

Every quote for Acton starts with somebody standing in the actual place. Square footage over the phone is a guess, and on a wall it is worse than a guess, because the failure depth only shows when you put a hand on the joint. You get the scope written out area by area and one number for the job, usually the same business day.