We clean offices with safe, green products

Every office visit follows the same order

We start every office visit by emptying trash and recycling and putting in fresh liners. Then we dust from the top down: shelves, window sills, picture frames and the tops of cabinets. Desks and counters come next, once the dust above them has already fallen. Restrooms and the break room get cleaned after that. Floors always come last, because everything we do above them drops something on them.

When the order is right, you can tell the next morning. The trash cans are empty and lined. Desks have no film of dust along the back edge where the monitor sits. The restroom mirror has no streaks, and the sink is wiped dry. Carpet shows vacuum lines all the way to the walls and under the desks. The office smells like nothing at all, which is how a clean room should smell.

Skip a step or change the order and it shows. Dust the shelves after the desks and the dust lands on the desks you just wiped. Mop before you vacuum and the grit on the floor turns into muddy streaks that dry in place. The step most people skip is the small stuff everybody touches: door handles, light switches, copier buttons and the fridge handle. Those are the surfaces that pass a cold from desk to desk.

• Trash and recycling emptied, fresh liners in
• Shelves and sills dusted from the top down
• Door handles and light switches wiped every visit
• Restrooms and break room cleaned with green products
• Hard floors vacuumed before they are mopped

We use green products in shared offices

We use the same safe, green products in offices that we use in homes. That matters more at work than most people expect. Many offices have windows that stay shut all year and air that circulates through one system all day. The smell of a harsh cleaner does not leave when we do. It hangs in that shared air for hours, and the people with asthma or allergies are the first ones to notice it.

A green product still has to be used the right way to work. Spraying a counter and wiping it dry in the same motion mostly moves dirt around. The product needs to sit wet on the surface for a short while, then get wiped with a clean cloth. On a sink with soap scum built up, it also needs a brush. Green or not, the result comes from that wait and from the scrubbing.

The other half is keeping cloths separate. A cloth that just cleaned a toilet should never touch a break room counter or the table in your waiting room. We keep restroom cloths apart from the ones used on desks and kitchen counters. When a cloth gets dirty, we switch to a fresh one instead of rinsing it and carrying on. Skip that step and an office can get wiped down every week and still pass the same stomach bug around.

Each season brings a different office mess

Kernersville sits on Piedmont red clay, and that clay does not stay outside. On a wet day it comes in on shoes and leaves a rust-colored stain on the carpet inside the door. Scrubbing it while it is wet is the mistake, because water and pressure push it deeper into the fibers. Once it dries, most of it lifts out with a slow vacuum, and then we treat the stain that is left.

Spring brings the pollen. Around the Triad, pine and oak pollen turns cars yellow for a few weeks. Some of it blows in every time the front door opens. It settles on window sills and on the desks closest to the entrance. A dry feather duster throws it back into the air for everyone to breathe. During pollen season we dust with a damp cloth, so the pollen stays on the cloth and leaves the building with us.

Humidity is the summer problem. Triad summers stay damp for months, and an office restroom with a weak exhaust fan never fully dries out between uses. Mildew starts in the grout lines and around the base of the toilet. It brings a musty smell that air freshener only hides for an hour. We scrub those grout lines and the toilet base on every visit. A restroom that gets wiped but not scrubbed smells clean that day and sour again by midweek.

Your type of building changes the job

Some offices around Kernersville are in older houses that were turned into office space. They often have hardwood or old sheet vinyl floors and one small restroom the whole staff shares. Hardwood in these houses gets a damp mop, never a wet one. Standing water soaks into the seams between old boards, and in a humid summer the boards swell and curl up at the edges. Old window sills and carved wood trim have ledges that catch dust, so we wipe them every visit.

The single-story brick office buildings and strip plazas along the main roads are a different job. Office areas usually have carpet tile, and break rooms and restrooms usually have vinyl tile. Carpet tile traps grit along its seams and against the walls, so we vacuum the edges as well as the open aisles. Vinyl tile goes dull fast when it is mopped with dirty water. We change the mop water often, and you can see the difference in the shine.

Other businesses run a small front office with a warehouse or shop behind it, all on a concrete slab. Dust from the back drifts into the office every time the loading door opens. That front office gets dusty faster than a normal office, so we dust the desks and shelves on every visit. The floor gets a dry dust mop before any wet mop touches it. Mopping straight over that fine dust leaves a gray film you can see as soon as the floor dries.

Foot traffic decides how often we clean

A quiet office with a few people and no visitors is a different job from a waiting room open to the public. The quiet office may only need its restroom and floors done on a regular schedule, with a full dusting less often. A restroom that customers use and a break room where everyone eats lunch get dirty much faster. Those busy spots decide the schedule for the whole office, because they are the rooms people judge you by.

Our listed hours are Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and Saturday, 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM. During the week, we can work around your staff and start in the empty rooms. If you close on weekends, a Saturday visit lets us clean the whole space with nobody in the way. Either way, we agree up front on which rooms matter most, and those get done first.

Take Care Cleaning offers online estimates, and the more you tell us, the closer it comes to the real job. Let us know how many rooms and restrooms you have and what floors are in each area. It also helps to know how many people come through on a normal day. We clean offices in Kernersville, Walkertown, Winston-Salem and High Point. Or call (336) 310-9620 during the hours above and talk it through.