How to Prepare for Your First Cleaning Visit

Do not clean before we come

This is the one everybody does, and it is the one that costs you.

Our price is per visit, not per hour. Wiping your counters before we arrive does not save you money, it just means we clean an already-clean counter. What genuinely helps is the opposite kind of work: not cleaning things, but clearing them, so we can reach what we came for.

Ten minutes of putting things away is worth an hour of wiping things down.

The ten minutes that do help

Pick up the floor. Toys, shoes, laundry, the dog’s rope. Vacuuming around a floor full of objects takes twice as long and does half as much.

Clear the flat surfaces you want cleaned. Kitchen counters, the dining table, bathroom vanities, nightstands. We move small things and put them back — we cannot move an entire counter’s worth of mail and appliances and still finish the kitchen.

Deal with the sink. Dishes left in the sink are not part of a clean. We will run a dishwasher you have already started, but a full sink means the sink itself does not get scrubbed, and the sink is one of the things people notice most.

Put the valuables away. Not because of us. Because a clear surface is a surface that gets cleaned properly, and nobody should be cleaning around your grandmother’s ring.

Leave fresh sheets out if you want the beds changed. Beds get made on every visit. Sheets get changed when there is a clean set sitting on the bed, and not otherwise, because guessing at somebody’s linen closet goes wrong in both directions.

Decide the add-ons before, not during

Four things sit outside a standard clean and are worth deciding on now rather than on the day: inside the fridge $35, inside the oven $35, interior windows $6 each, and laundry $25 per load.

They are separate because each of them is a job in its own right, not a surface. An oven is the better part of an hour. If it is on the list, we plan the visit around it; if it comes up at the door, something else has to give.

The whole add-on list and every published rate is on the pricing page. On a move-in or move-out clean the fridge and the oven are already included, so there is nothing to add.

Tell us the things we would otherwise find out

Some of the most useful notes on a quote form take one line.

• Fragile finishes. Stained millwork that has never been painted, unsealed plaster, original hex tile, leaded glass. Common in Upper Arlington, Bexley, Grandview Heights and Old Worthington, and worth naming, because the right product on original finishes is not the strongest one.
• Luxury vinyl plank. Very common in newer builds. It gets a damp flat mop and never a steam mop, because steam gets under the seams and lifts them.
• A room to skip. A home office mid-project, a nursery with a sleeping baby, a room you would simply rather nobody went into. Say so and it comes off the list.
• A room that matters most. If the thing you actually care about is the shower glass, tell us and it gets prioritised every single visit.
• Rooms that are not on the listing. A finished third floor, a loft over the stairs, a bonus room above the garage, a finished lower level. These count in the quote, and the number is only right if we know about them.

Getting us in

Most customers are at work. That is normal and it is fine.

A door code is the easiest thing, a key left somewhere agreed is the next easiest, and a front desk that will let us up works in most buildings. Tell us which on the form. If you would rather be there for the first visit and walk through the house with your cleaner, that is a good use of an hour and plenty of people do it once and never again.

Two Columbus-specific things worth mentioning:

Parking. In the Short North, German Village and downtown, parking is the genuine constraint — not the cleaning. If you have a permit spot, an alley, or a garage space, say so. In Grandview the answer is almost always the detached garage off the rear alley.

HOAs and gates. Some associations want vendors to sign in or display a placard — it comes up most often in the newer Hilliard subdivisions. Tell us at booking and we handle it beforehand rather than discovering it at the gate with a cleaner sitting in a car.

Pets

Pets do not change your price. They do change the visit, so we would rather know.

Tell us what you have, where it will be, and whether it is fine with a stranger in the house. A dog that needs to be crated, a cat that must not get out the front door, a bird that objects to the vacuum — all of that goes into your cleaner’s notes permanently, not just for the first visit.

One limit, said plainly: pet waste is not part of a clean. Litter boxes and accidents are yours. Hair, mud, nose prints on the glass door and the tracked-in half of a Powell back yard are ours.

What happens on the day

You get a message from us before the first visit, while saying no still costs you nothing. It has your cleaner’s first name, the date, a two-hour arrival window, roughly how long they have been doing this, and one or two honest sentences about why we matched them to your home. If you would rather we matched you with someone else, you reply and say so. You do not need a reason and nothing has been charged.

Nobody arrives at your door as a stranger you were not told about. That is the entire point of the message, and you can read exactly what it says before you ever fill in a form.

On the day, expect two to four hours for a standard clean of most homes and four to eight for a deep clean. Your cleaner works the same published checklist every visit and does a walkthrough before leaving.

Afterwards

Look at it. Actually look — open the shower, check the baseboards in one room, run a hand along a windowsill.

If a room is not right, tell us within 24 hours and we come back and re-clean it at no charge. You decide whether it was right; there is no inspection, no scoring, and nothing to prove. The terms are written down and dated so we cannot quietly narrow them afterwards.

The window is short on purpose. A clean does not stay a clean once a household lives in it, and we would much rather come back on Tuesday than argue about Thursday.

What it costs, before you book any of it

Every rate is published. A standard clean of a three-bedroom, two-bath home is $199; booking every two weeks takes 15% off that. The quote form prices your own home in about a minute and does not ask for your phone number until the end.

If you are still deciding what to book, deep clean or standard clean is the question worth settling first, and the full breakdown of what house cleaning costs in Columbus has the rest of the market in it too.