Window Cleaning Inside, Outside, Screens and Tracks

A window is three separate jobs and only one of them is the glass. Clean the pane, leave the screen where it is, and the first hard rain rinses a year of screen dirt straight down what you just paid for. So screens come out, get washed, get dried and go back into the opening they came from, because they stop being interchangeable once a house has settled around them. Tracks and sills are next, and they get vacuumed dry before anything damp arrives, since grit plus a wet cloth makes a paste you then have to dig out of the corners. Then there are the storms. This housing stock is full of them, triple track aluminum on a two family and wood panels that come off a colonial every spring. The haze people blame on their glass usually lives on the two faces nobody reaches without pulling that panel.

There is a real difference between glass that has been squeegeed and glass that has been wiped. A clean rubber blade, a properly soaped pane and one controlled pull leave the surface dry in a single pass, and the edges get detailed afterward. A spray bottle and a paper towel leave a thin film of whatever was in the bottle, plus lint, and it reads as streaking the moment afternoon sun crosses the pane at an angle. Height is the other question people ask about. On a triple decker, second and third floor glass gets reached from a ladder where the ground under the feet is solid and level, and from inside wherever a sash tilts or a storm panel comes out. Past safe ladder work we tell you at the estimate, not on the morning of the job.

What the visit covers

• Clean both faces of the glass, then detail the edges
• Pull the screens, wash them and dry them before refitting
• Return each screen to the opening it came out of
• Vacuum the tracks and the sills dry before anything damp
• Take out storm panels and do all four faces of glass
• Squeegee instead of wiping, so nothing dries as a film
• Wipe frames, stops and hardware on the way through
• Do the entry door, the storm door and the sidelights
• Reach upper floors by ladder only where footing is solid
• Name any scratch or failed seal we find, in writing

Spring, fall and storefront glass

Two stretches of the year fill the calendar, for good reasons. Spring is the obvious one: a winter of road spray and grit has built a film on the outside of everything, and the screens are coming back out of the basement anyway. Fall is the booking people miss. Once a storm panel sits in front of the primary sash, cleaning the outside of that sash means taking the assembly apart all over again, so October is cheaper and simpler than December. Book ahead of the storms going on and the winter view is a different experience entirely. Exterior painting comes out of this same company, which matters more than it sounds: glass gets done after the scraping and the trim work, never the week before a crew sands above it.

Commercial glass runs early. A storefront on Merrimack Street or a lobby off Route 3 gets finished before the doors unlock, so no customer is stepping around a bucket, and that covers entry glass, the door itself, the push plate and the frame track. Frequency goes in writing per location, because a busy entrance needs the inside face at hand height far more often than upper floor windows need anything at all. The company is licensed and insured, and a management office can have the certificate before the first early start. The last piece is being straight about what is glass and what is dirt. A scratch from a ring, a razor or a stone thrown by a mower is in the glass. A cloudy patch between two panes that never wipes off is a failed seal with moisture inside the unit. Both get named at the estimate.