We clean every rental with green products

We reset every room between guests

A guest checks out in the morning. The next one's due that afternoon, and the house has to match your listing photos when the door opens. That's a short clock. We start by walking every room with a trash bag and pulling out what the last guest left behind. Closets and nightstands get checked for chargers and jewelry. Then we strip the beds, so the used sheets are out of the way before the real cleaning starts.

We work top to bottom in every room. Ceiling fans and the tops of door frames get dusted first. Dust falls. A floor mopped under a dirty fan gets mopped twice. Bathrooms and the kitchen come next, and they take the longest. Then the beds get made with clean sheets. Floors are last, worked from the back of the house toward the front door. That way nobody walks across a clean floor to fix something they missed.

Done right, a guest walks in and sees no sign of the person who stayed before. No hair in the tub drain. No old coffee in the pot. The step people skip when they're rushed is the final walk through the house. That's where a sock under the bed or a glass left on the deck turns into a line in a bad review. So we take that walk before we lock the door. Every time.

• Every room checked for items guests left
• Beds stripped and made with your clean linens
• Bathrooms scrubbed, including the shower glass
• Kitchen wiped down and the fridge cleared out
• Floors vacuumed and mopped as the last step

We use green products in every rental

Each stay brings a different family into your rental. You've got no way of knowing if one of them has asthma, or a baby who'll spend the weekend crawling on the rug. Harsh cleaners leave a smell and a film behind. The next guest walks straight into both. We clean with safe, green products that protect people and pets. When the door opens, the house smells like nothing at all.

Plenty of hosts allow dogs to fill more nights on the calendar. Dog hair works into the rug and the couch cushions. Red clay from a muddy walk ends up in the bottom of the shower. We vacuum the upholstery along with the floors. We also check under the beds, where hair collects. A guest with a pet allergy will find what got missed within an hour. Then they'll say so in the review.

A green product still has to cut grease. After a family has cooked in your kitchen for a week, the stovetop's sticky and somebody's made popcorn in the microwave. We spray those spots and let them soak before we wipe. That wait is the step most people skip. Spray and wipe right away and you only push the grime around. Give it a few minutes. It comes off in one pass.

North Carolina weather gets inside your rental

Picture a rental that sat closed up for three days in July. The Piedmont humidity has nowhere to go. Towels left damp in a hamper turn sour within a day or two, and shower grout grows a pink or black film at the corners. A guest smells the house before they see anything in it. So we run the bathroom fans while we work. Every wet surface gets dried before we leave.

A lot of houses around Kernersville and Walkertown are brick ranches on crawl spaces. The newer subdivisions lean toward vinyl-sided two-story homes. A crawl space pulls ground moisture up through the floor all summer. A musty smell settles into the carpet and the closets. We check for that smell on every visit. If a room still smells damp after a full clean, we'll tell you. Cleaning can't fix a moisture problem under the house.

Every spring the pine pollen turns porches and patio furniture yellow across Forsyth and Guilford counties. Guests track it in on their shoes. It settles on the window sills inside. A rental that looked spotless in March can look neglected two weeks later. During pollen season we wipe down the patio chairs and the table guests actually sit at. We clean the sills and the sliding door glass too. That's where the yellow shows first.

Busy booking weeks need a steady routine

Twice a year the furniture market in High Point fills rentals across the Triad. Hosts from Kernersville to Winston-Salem stack one booking right against the next. Graduation weekends at the colleges in Winston-Salem and Greensboro do the same thing. Those weeks, a clean between guests can't run long. The only way to get a house right on a tight window is to clean it in the same order every time. Then nothing depends on memory.

Guest changeovers go fastest when the house has an owner's closet. Clean sheet sets and spare towels live there, along with toilet paper and dish soap. Without that closet, every visit becomes a hunt for sheets. We make the beds from it and set out paper goods in the bathrooms and the kitchen. When something's running low, we'll tell you. Better you hear it from us than from a guest's message.

A clean between guests is the only time anybody looks closely at your rental. We're in every room. So we see the dead bulb in the bedroom lamp and the new stain on the couch cushion. We pass those along after the clean, while there's still time to fix them. A host who finds out from a review has already lost that guest. Maybe the next few who read it, too.