Greensboro homes cleaned with safe products

Older Greensboro houses need gentler cleaning

Greensboro has a lot of old houses, and many of them sit close to downtown. Fisher Park, a short walk north, and Irving Park beyond it are full of homes with tall ceilings and the original hardwood floors still down. They're lovely houses to live in. They also collect more dust than a newer house. The doors and windows have wide wooden trim, and dust settles on the flat tops.

Old hardwood is where a rushed cleaning does real damage. The finish on a floor that old is often worn thin, especially down a hallway or in front of the kitchen sink. Soak it with a wet mop and water gets into the seams. That can leave dark lines and boards that lift at the edges. Strong cleaners cause their own trouble. They eat away at whatever finish is left, and the wood goes dull.

So in an older house we work from the top down. We dust the ceiling corners and the tops of the trim first, so nothing falls onto a floor we've already cleaned. Hardwood gets a damp mop with a green product and it's left dry. If a floor looks worn past what cleaning can fix, we also offer floor sanding and polishing. Ask about it when you call.

• Trim tops and door frames dusted by hand
• Hardwood damp mopped, never soaked
• Pollen wiped off sills and vent covers
• Shower caulk scrubbed before mildew sets in
• Green products in homes with kids and pets

Spring pollen gets inside Greensboro houses

Many Greensboro streets sit under big oaks and pines. Every spring those trees drop a coat of yellow pollen on everything, and if you've left a car outside in April, you've seen it. The pollen doesn't stay outdoors. It rides in on shoes and on the dog, and it slips through window screens and the gaps around older window frames. A house can look clean and still hold a fine yellow film on its flat surfaces.

Left alone, pollen builds up in the places people stop looking. Fan blades and the tops of kitchen cabinets go a dull yellow-gray, and the heating and air system blows it back through the house. A humid day makes it worse. Damp pollen turns sticky, and a dry cloth just smears it around. For a senior or a child with allergies, the sneezing keeps going indoors long after the trees are done.

During pollen season we wipe surfaces with a damp cloth instead of a dry one. We go after the places pollen settles, like window sills and the covers on air vents. Summer brings a different problem. The air here stays humid for months, and that's when mildew starts along the caulk in a shower. We scrub it off with green products while it's still on the surface.

We clean Greensboro homes before and after moves

Plenty of Greensboro homes change hands every year. The city has several colleges, and the rentals near the campuses get new tenants when a school year ends. Families move in and out for jobs across the Triad, too. Once the furniture is gone, a house shows what it was hiding. You'll see dust lines where a couch stood and crumbs at the back of kitchen drawers. That's the time to clean it properly.

Skip that cleaning and somebody pays for it. A renter can lose part of a deposit over a greasy stove hood or a dirty tub. A buyer moves in on top of grime the last owner stopped seeing years ago. Greensboro's red clay adds its own mess. On a wet moving day it comes in on every pair of boots and leaves orange marks by the doors.

On a moving clean we work through the empty house a room at a time. We wipe out the inside of the cabinets and drawers and clean the baseboards along every wall. Bathrooms get scrubbed down to the grout, and the floors come last. Tell us if it's the place you're leaving or the place you're moving into. Give us the move date too, so we can plan the work.

Getting a price in Greensboro

Call us at (336) 310-9620 or request an online estimate. Tell us roughly how big the house is and how many bathrooms it has. Say whether you want a standard clean or a deep clean, and mention it if you're moving. We'll send back a free quote, so you'll know the price before we arrive. We're open weekdays during business hours and Saturdays until early afternoon, and Greensboro is a short drive east of our base in Kernersville.